“For my part,” suggested Harrison with a quiet twinkle in his eyes, “I’m just as willing to let someone else take this child out to the woodshed now.”

“Hamilton Burton is outgrowing restraint.”  Malone was snapping out his words with categorical crispness.  “Do you realize the perilous scope of his dream?  His overvaulting ambition looks to a one-man power of finance; a power vested solely in himself.  We are rearing a Frankenstein, gentlemen.  To overlook it means our ultimate ruin—­and, what is more, a national cataclysm.”

“And yet,” interposed Harrison quietly, “his power is largely of our making.  We took him to our hearts.”

J.J.  Malone admitted the statement with a grave nod.

“Up to the point where arrogance became a mania, he was a most valuable lieutenant.  I select men for efficiency.  When they seek to become usurpers, I endeavor to halt them.”

The Honorable S.T.  Browne, as general counsel for many Consolidated interests, had evolved the theorem that from every statute there is an escape.  Now he inquired, “How did he gain his seat in the saddle?  Sudden, wasn’t it?”

“He came into my office one day only a few years ago,” answered the chief baron.  “Twice I refused to see him, but he meant to see me—­and he did.  More than that, he fascinated me.  I knew that I was talking with a genius and a man of dauntless mind.  Such minds I can use.  I used his.”

Meegan knocked the ash from his cigar and laughed.  “Burton has a certain hypnotic quality of address,” he conceded.

“It is not address—­it is genius.  This man held me with his eye and forced me to listen.  He came with no apology and no misgiving.  He knew himself for a child of Destiny, and within ten minutes I knew it, too.  What is the biggest accomplishment, gentlemen, that stands to the credit of Consolidated in the past ten years?”

“The merging of Inter-ocean Coal and Ore.”  Meegan gave the response without hesitation, and no one contradicted him.

“That,” asserted Malone, “was the wild scheme which Hamilton Burton brought to me as his letter of introduction.  I found no flaw in his plan—­aside from its stupendous audacity.  You ask me why I put him in a position of power.  He rode in on his own usefulness—­led by his intrinsic self-faith.”

“So far as you have gone,” suggested Harrison drily, “you have summarized several fairly solid reasons for keeping him with us.”

“Quite true.  I concede him a Napoleonic caliber and I recognize his Napoleonic effrontery.  His conscienceless lust for power has unbalanced him.  He seeks to sack the world.  He must be stopped.”

“So you suggest—?” Browne left his question unfinished save for the interrogation of his lifted brows.

“He sits in seven of our directorates.  You know how Consolidated has sought to avoid the appearance of too narrow a domination.  You know, too, that we have avoided directors who were obviously pure dummies.  For several weeks I have been tracing out the holdings in Coal and Ore stock.  Hamilton Burton with his following looms too large.  Left to his own devices, he may outgrow control.”