Robert H. Norcross looked up from a sheet of figures, and turned his vision upon the serrated spire of old Trinity Church, far below.  Since his eyes began to fail, he had cultivated the salutary habit of resting them every half-hour or so.  The action was merely mechanical; his mind still lingered on the gross earnings of the reorganized L.D. and M. railroad.  It was a sultry afternoon in early fall.  The roar of lower New York came up to him muffled by the haze.  The traffic seemed to move more slowly than usual, as though that haze clogged its wheels and congealed its oils.  The very tugs and barges, on the river beyond, partook of the season’s languor.  They crept over the oily waves at a sluggard pace, their smoke-streamers dropping wearily toward the water.

The eyes of Robert H. Norcross swept this vista for the allotted two minutes of rest.  Presently—­and with the very slightest change of expression—­they fixed themselves on a point so far below that he needs must lean forward and rest his arms on the window sill in order to look.  He wasted thus a minute; and such a wasting, in the case of Robert H. Norcross, was a considerable matter.  The Sunday newspapers—­when in doubt—­always played the income of Robert H. Norcross by periods of months, weeks, days, hours and minutes.  Every minute of his time, their reliable statisticians computed, was worth a trifle less than forty-seven dollars.  Regardless of the waste of time, he continued to gaze until the watch on his desk had ticked off five minutes, or two hundred and thirty-five dollars.

The thing which had caught and held his attention was a point in the churchyard of old Trinity near to the south door.

The Street had been remarking, for a year, that Norcross was growing old.  The change did not show in his operations.  His grip on the market was as firm as ever, his judgment as sure, his imagination as daring, his habit of keeping his own counsel as settled.  Within that year, he had consummated the series of operations by which the L.D. and M., final independent road needed by his system, had “come in”; within that year, he had closed the last finger of his grip on a whole principality of our domain.  Every laborer in that area would thenceforth do a part of his day’s delving, every merchant a part of his day’s bargaining, for Robert H. Norcross.  Thenceforth—­until some other robber baron should wrest it from his hands—­Norcross would make laws and unmake legislatures, dictate judgments and overrule appointments—­give the high justice while courts and assemblies trifled with the middle and the low.  Certainly the history of that year in American finance indicated no flagging in the powers of Robert H. Norcross.