“The Great Bear, damn him!” he exclaimed with savage vehemence.  “The buccaneer’s got some fresh piracy on foot if I know that sardonic grin.”  Within the half-hour a mysteriously fathered rumor passed from mouth to mouth on the floor of the Exchange, that Hamilton Burton was drawing his battle-lines and that somewhere his bolt would fall.  Because the report was untraceable it was the more disquieting, and the Stock-Exchange is ever ready to rock to an alarm.  Yet just now, the man whose silent smile could give birth to such sweeping potentialities did nothing more significant than gaze absently at the tide of life which eddied through Broadway’s canon and at the disintegrating tombstones which spoke of death in the shadow of Trinity.

There was something of tawny and tigerish splendor about this young man who had sprung with mushroom swiftness from nowhere into the fierce eminence of a financial conqueror.  The supple grace of his movements attested ready power.  The immaculate elegance of his apparel challenged notice by a flawlessness which went beyond the art of the tailor who clothed him and assumed a distinction as though it had been the belted uniform of a field marshal.  Though pronounced the best-dressed man in New York, he escaped all seeming of foppishness.  Each small detail, from the flower in his lapel to his gloves and shoes, seemed a significant touch.

Hamilton Burton lent qualities from himself to everything that marked him—­and these qualities seemed to go like heralds at his front, proclaiming, “This man is led by a star—­his head overlooks the crowd!”

Men and women staring out from a sight-seeing car turned their heads with a common accord, their attention arrested by something intangible.

Then as the megaphone operator lowered his voice it became pregnant with importance.  To visitors from Paris, Kentucky, Berlin, Iowa, and Cairo, Illinois, he confided, “The gentleman by the car with the broken wind-shield is Hamilton Burton.”  It was enough.  It conjured up to memory newspaper stories of a genie to whose wand fabulous tides of gold responded.  These sight-seers were beholding a man credited with the power to cause or avert panics; one of the most lauded, the most hated and the most feared men in finance, and, for some inexplicable reason, after they looked at him it was no longer difficult to believe the stories of his wizardry.

He nodded to Paul and turned toward the door.  Once more he repeated, “Then above me there shall be—­no other man,” and though he said it with all the arrogant and ruthless spirit of a tyrant who would take no count of razed cities as he rode to his victory, yet he said it in a low and pleasant voice; a voice even tinged with musical gentleness.

At the twentieth floor where the elevator stopped to let him alight, Hamilton’s eyes were aglow with the reflected light of his thoughts.  He was still young and before him lay conquests that should dwarf those of the past.  Posterity should link his name with achievements so titanic that history would be beggared for a precedent.  Kingdoms would be his clients and kings his vassals.