“You sent for me, Malone.  I declined to come to you.  Then you came to me.  As yet you have shown no reason for the visit except to swear around my office like a drunken and abusive pirate.  If you have nothing for temperate discussion, I will now say good-day to you.  Take with you the honors of war, sir.  You have outcussed me.  I acknowledge your superiority in billingsgate—­“—­he paused and for an instant his voice mounted, as he added—­“and in nothing else!”

“Have you reached so secure a stage, then, that you can defy and insult Harrison and myself?  Are you prepared to declare war on the entire world of finance?” Now Malone spoke with regained composure, but an ominous undernote of threat.  “Let’s have done with pretense.  In so far as any individuals can make or break—­we can.  When you came, an unlicked cub, into the world of large affairs it was through us you made the alliances upon which your success is built.  However great you conceive yourself to be, ‘Consolidated’ still recognizes in us its active heads.”

Hamilton Burton replied with a smile of unruffled calm.  “You say I came to you.  Many men have come to you, only to go away again with empty hands.”

“You did not.”

“No.  You took me to your hearts—­but why?  Was it because you pitied me?  Has pity or gentle courtesy ever yet prevented ‘Consolidated’ from crucifying a victim?  You conceded me my seat at your directorates only because you were compelled to recognize my value there.  You lifted me from the ranks to the general staff of finance because of unescapable conviction that I inherently belonged among you; that I should take my place there as an ally or an enemy.  You had a suspicion then of what I knew before I ever saw a city—­that I could not be stopped.”

“Grant for the sake of brevity that Genius and Destiny are your handmaidens.”  Malone leaned across the table, resting his weight on his planted knuckles.  Under his shaggy brows his eyes burned deeply and satirically.  Across from him Hamilton Burton stood, younger, slenderer and more pliant of pose; his eyes meeting those of his protagonist, level and unwavering.  “Grant that all your self-adulation is warrantable.  Now that you have attained this place in the councils of the few, do you mean to become only a wrecker and a spoiler?  Do you recognize no rules of war?  Do you adhere to no principles of loyalty?  Are you merely a breeder of storms and a maker of panics?  Because if you are, by the Eternal God, I think we are yet strong enough to stamp you out—­to utterly obliterate you!”

“So”—­the younger man’s lips twisted in a smile of cool irony—­“you have come as the guardians of conservatism to admonish me, the fractious child of the Dollar family.  It is delightful, gentlemen, to encounter in actual life so humorous a situation.”  Then the mouth line grew set again and the voice hardened.  “Well, I make you no pledges.  I say to you, to hell with the laws you draw for your own advantage and break when it suits your profit.  I acknowledge no vested right in you to assail me as a wrecker—­you who have risen on wreckage.  You will not obliterate me.  You will not even try.”