A few minutes afterward the door opened again, opened to frame the bulky figure of a man who had swept by those who sought to announce his coming.  The heavy brows of J.J.  Malone were contracted over smoldering gray eyes which many men feared and all but a few obeyed.  At his elbow followed the slight wiry figure of a companion with nervous eyes, and a cigar which was always chewed and never lighted.  This man had come, as Ham had come, from the hardness of some barren farm and had obdurately hammered his path by the sheer insistence of his brain into the inner circle of an oligarchy.  These two greatest of America’s money barons ignored the gesture with which the younger Warwick invited them to be seated.  In the brief silence that followed upon their entrance was the portent of a brewing tempest.  At last Malone said crisply: 

“I sent for you, Mr. Burton.  Most men come to me when I send for them.”

“In several respects I differ from most men.”  The reply was too quiet to ring flippant.  It was merely the assurance of invincible self-faith, and for an instant the man who had not in years been compelled to soften the iron grip of his mastery gazed his astonishment.

Then Malone burst into an oriflamme of anger.  He was a whirlwind of fury before whose raging any small or timid man must have shriveled.  The eyes that shone out under the heavy lashes as he paced the place, with clenched hands, were batteries raining shrapnel of wrath.

From their gray depths they blackened into ink, across which shot the red and yellow flocks of a fiery and passionate autocracy.  The iron jaw, inherited from seafaring forefathers, snapped on words of threat, rebuke, and invective.  He wore his sixty-five years as lightly as foliage, standing straight and strong like a poplar tree, save as he bent to the gusts of his own passion.  Where his clenched fist fell upon desk or table the furniture trembled.  Through the frosted glass of the door Hamilton Burton saw the shadows of hurrying figures and knew that the secretaries and stenographers out there were in a flutter of uneasy excitement.  Wall street knew what it meant when the “old man” was on the rampage.

While this tempest endured the nervous-looking man took a chair and sat silent.  His attitude was hunched up and he chewed on his unlighted cigar, while his restless gaze traveled here, there, everywhere.  On casual glance one might have overlooked him as negligible, thereby falling gravely into error.  The giant and the slight man had this kinship, that in the workings of great finance they were mainspring and balance wheel, and at their prompting many divisions of the world’s industrial armies marched or marked time.

Suddenly J.J.  Malone fell silent, and then Hamilton Burton spoke.  He spoke with a surprising calm for one of his uncompromising arrogance.  Perhaps it accorded with his whim to chill his words with icy insolence that they might cut the more and point the greater contrast when he chose to unleash his own hot wrath.