Harrison from his chair gazed thoughtfully and silently out of the window.  He watched a gull dip over the East River.  He shifted the cigar to the other side of his mouth and across his gray eyes flickered a ghost of amusement.  After a long pause he inquired in an impassive voice: 

“Why?”

“Because just as you at first accepted me for my usefulness, so you will again come to me when you need me, and you know you will need me.  We are playing the same game and it’s no child’s kissing game.  When you have both the wish and power to crush me, I shall expect no kindly warning at your hands.  When you need me, you will let no dislike bar my door to your coming.  By the way, why did you come?”

“Your ticker isn’t silent out there.  It’s not your custom to be uninformed.”  It was Malone who spoke.  “You know that the floor is seething—­and why!”

“I know that the market opened quiet and that later Coal Tars broke and there is a flurry—­a panicky feeling perhaps.  It doesn’t surprise me.”

For an instant Malone regarded his former protege across the table.  Hamilton Burton’s fingers had fallen on a small bronze paper-weight.  It was an eagle with spread wings, not the bird of freedom, but the eagle of the emperor’s standards.

“You perplex me,” admitted the elder financier shortly.  “You make great pretense of open frankness; brazen defiance even, and yet you choose to cloak every attack and to move by stealth.  You know that just now such a flurry may precipitate a general panic that will shake and waste the nation like a fever in its marrow.  Apparently you are deliberately breaking the market, yet you speak innocently of the matter as of something with which you have no concern.”

For an instant it was Burton who laughed.

“And even yet, gentlemen, you have for active business men, bent on stemming a tide of disaster, spent much time in generalities and little on any concrete suggestion.”

“We acted before we began to talk,” said J.J.  Malone; “we have taken steps to support Coal Tars, but the times are parlous.  The tidal wave of a panic mounts rapidly.  If you insist on forcing us into a duel on the floor of the Stock-Exchange today, the pillars of public confidence may be seriously shaken.  By two o’clock this afternoon the president’s gavel will be falling to announce failures.  The disaster that we have feared will come.  In the end we shall beat you, but all of us will have wasted ourselves in an exhausting struggle.  There will be wreckage strewn from ocean to ocean.  We have come to remonstrate.  We have come to urge peace among ourselves and to warn you that a war between us is hardly a thing for you to court.”