“Oh, yes,” he replied thoughtfully.  “I’ve planned—­sure.  But I guess I’m in the dark a bit.  It’s going to cost a deal.  It’s not going to be easy.  You were ready to buy.  It was not necessarily to be the Skandinavia who bought.  Well, are you—­going to vote the credit for this fight?” He smiled uncertainly.  “And to what extent?”

“The limit.  Go on.”

Peterman nodded.

“There’s no commercial enterprise that can stand idleness.  His work must stop.  His—­”

“That is the A.B.C. of it.”

There was sharp impatience in the financier’s biting tone.

“Just so.  It is the A.B.C. of it.”

Hellbeam set back in his chair.  He clasped his hands across his stomach.

“I will tell you,” he said, a wicked smile lighting his deep-set eyes, his cheeks rounding themselves in his satisfaction.  “His work will stop.  His mill is far away.  There is no protection from attack except that which he can set up himself.  He is going away.  He will have eighteen hundred miles of water between him and his mill.  It should be easy with a good plan and all the money.  Listen.

“His work must stop.  How?  There are ways.  His mill may burn.  His forests may burn.  His men may revolt.  They may refuse to work for him.  All, or any of these things may serve.  There are men at all times ready to carry out these things.  You can tell them, or you need not, the way they must act.”  He shook his head.  “You say to them his work must stop; and you pay them more than he can pay them.  So his work will stop.  That is so?  Yes?  Very well.  There is ha’f a million dollars that will pay for his work to stop.  I say that.”

Peterman was startled.  He had not been prepared for so sweeping a proposal.  He had understood that the man had been prepared to stand at almost nothing in his desire to achieve some end, the nature of which still remained somewhat obscure to him.  For all his own lack of scruple in his dealings with those who offended, the calm, fiendish purpose of this man shocked him not a little.

He took the chair usually occupied by his visitors.

“You will pay ha’f a million dollars for this thing?” he demanded, to re-assure himself.

Self-satisfaction looked out of the eyes of the man behind the desk.

“More—­if necessary.”

“By God!  You must hate this boy, Sternford.”

Peterman’s feelings had broken from under his control.

“Sternford?  Psha!  It is not Sternford.  No.”

The smile had gone from Hellbeam’s eyes.  They were fiercely burning.  They were the hot, passionate eyes of a man obsessed, of a man possessed of a monomania.  Peterman, watching, beheld the sudden change in him.  He shrank before the insanity he had so deeply probed.

Hellbeam sat forward in his chair.  His forearms were resting on the desk, and his hands were clenched so that the finger-nails almost cut into the flesh of their palms.  His massive face was flushed, and the coarse veins at his temples stood out like cords.