“Here, I tell you,” he cried gutturally, returning in his fury to the native Teuton in him.  “Can you hate—­yes?  Have you known hate?  Eh?  No.  You the white liver have.  You cannot hate.  It is not in you.  Oh, no.  It is for me.  Yes.  It has been so for years.  And I tell you it is the only thing in life.  Woman?  No.  I have known them.  They mean little.  They are a pleasure that passes.  Money?  What is it when you play the market as you choose?  The day comes when you can help yourself.  And you no longer desire so to do.  Hate?  That lives.  That feeds on body and brain.  That consumes till there is only a dead carcase left.  Ah!  Hate is for the lifetime.  It can leave all those others as nothing.  In it there is joy, despair, all the time, every hour of life.”

He held up one hand and opened his fingers.  Then he slowly closed them with a curious expressive movement of ruthless destruction.

“You hate and you think.  You see your vengeance in operation.  You see him there in your hand; and you see the blood sweat as you squeeze and crush out the life that has offended.  Man, it is a joy that never leaves you till you accomplish this thing.  Then, after, you have the memory.  And while you think, even though he is dead, smashed in your grip, he still suffers as you think.  Oh, yes.”

“And you hate—­that way?”

A feeling of sudden fear had taken possession of Peterman.  This gross, squat man had become something terrible to him.

“Ja!”

The Teuton leapt in the furious emphasis hurled.

“Oh, ja!  I hate.  I tell you of it.”

The man with the insane eyes picked up a pen.  He turned it about in his fingers.  Then, suddenly, but slowly, the fingers began to break it.  The wood split under their pressure, and the pieces littered the table.  He gazed at them for a moment.  Then one hand clenched and came down with a crash on the blotting pad.  Then he sat back in his chair again, with his cruel eyes gazing straight out at the window opposite.

“It is years now.  Oh, yes.”  A deep breath escaped from between the man’s coarse lips.  “I ruled the markets.  I ruled them so that they obeyed me.  I was the money power of this continent.  I did as I chose.  So I thought.  Then he came.  This man.  He did not disturb me.  Oh, no.  I slept good all the time.  Then I woke.  I woke to find I was beaten of ten million dollars; and that Wall Street, the markets of the world, were laughing that this schoolmaster, this fool Scotsman from over the water, had picked my pocket while I slept.  It was not the money.  It was the laugh.  And he got away.  Oh, yes.  I tell it now.  The market knew of it then.  They laughed.  How they laughed.  So I sat and thought.  I had all.  There was nothing more to have.  And then I learned to hate.”

The narrowed eyes came back to the face of the man beside the desk.  There was a sharp intake of breath.

“This mill, this Sachigo, was built out of my money.  And the man who built it was the man who robbed me while I slept.”