“I got away with three hundred millions when Steel slumped from 105 to 50 and from 50 to 8, and no one knew I’d made a dollar.  You and ‘the Street’ read every morning last year the ‘guesses’ as to who could be rounding up the hundreds of millions on the slump.  The papers and the market letters one morning said it was ‘Standard Oil’; the next, that it was Morgan; then it was Frick, Schwab, Gates, and so on down through the list.  Of course, none of them denied; it is capital to all these knights of the road to be making millions in the minds of the world, even though they never get any of the money.  Dick Turpin and Jonathan Wild never were fonder of having the daring hold-ups that other highwaymen perpetrated laid to their doors, than are these modern bandits of being credited with ruthless deeds that they did not commit.  But Jim, ’twas I, ’twas I who sold Pennsylvania every morning for a year, while the selling was explained by the press as ’Cassatt cutting down Gould’s telegraph poles.  Gould and old man Rockefeller selling Pennsylvania to get even.’  Jim Randolph, I have to-day a billion dollars, not the Rockefeller or Carnegie kind, but a real billion.  If I had no other power but the power to call to-morrow for that billion in cash, it would be sufficient to lay in waste the financial world before to-morrow night.  You are welcome, Jim, to any part of that billion, and the more you take the happier you will make me, but when I strike in again, don’t attempt to stay me, for it will do no good.”

Shortly after this talk Bob left for Europe with Beulah.  A great German expert on brain disorders had held out hope that a six month’s treatment at his sanitarium in Berlin might aid in restoring her mind.  They returned the following August.  The trip had been fruitless.  It was plain to me that Bob was the same hopelessly desperate man as when he left, more hopeless, more desperate if anything than when he warned me of his determination.

When he left for Europe “the Street” breathed more freely, and as time went by and there was no sign of his confidence-disturbing influence in the market, the “System” began to bring out its deferred deals.  Times were ripe for setting up the most wildly inflated stock lamb-shearing traps.  It had been advertised throughout the world that Tom Reinhart, now a two-hundred-time millionaire, was to consolidate his and many other enterprises into one gigantic trust with twelve billions of capital.  His Union and Southern Pacific Railroads, his coal and Southern lines, together with his steamship company and lead, iron, and copper mines, were to be merged with the steel, traction, gas, and other enterprises he owned jointly with “Standard Oil.”  Some of the railroads owned by Rockefeller and his pals, in which Reinhart had no part, were to go in too, and with these was to unite that mother hog of them all, “Standard Oil” itself.  The trust was to be an enormous holding company, the like of which had until then not even been dreamed of by