issing him; "next
Thursday at three. Good night. Call me on the 'phone to-morrow."

CHAPTER 12

The Ames building, a block from the Stock Exchange, was originally
only five stories in height. But as the Ames interests grew, floor
after floor was added, until, on the day that Mrs. Hawley-Crowles
pointed it out to Carmen from the window of her limousine, it had
reached, tower and all, a height of twenty-five stories, and was
increasing at an average rate of two additional a year. It was not its
size that aroused interest, overtopped as it was by many others, but
its uniqueness; for, though a hive of humming industry, it did not
house a single business that was not either owned outright or
controlled by J. Wilton Ames, from the lowly cigar stands in the
marble corridors to the great banking house of Ames and Company on the
second floor. The haberdashers, the shoe-shining booths, the soda
fountains, and the great commercial enterprises that dwelt about them,
each and all acknowledged fealty and paid homage to the man who
brooded over them in his magnificent offices on the twenty-fifth floor
in the tower above.

It was not by any consensus of opinion among the financiers of New
York that Ames had assumed leadership, but by sheer force of what
was doubtless the most dominant character developed in recent
years by those peculiar forces which have produced the American
multimillionaire. "Mental dynamite!" was Weston's characterization
of the man. "And," he once added, when, despite his anger, he could
not but admire Ames's tactical blocking of his piratical move, which
the former's keen foresight had perceived threatened danger at
Washington, "it is not by any tacit agreement that we accept him,
but because he knows ten tricks to our one, that's all."

To look at the man, now in his forty-fifth year, meant, generally, an
expression of admiration for his unusual physique, and a wholly
erroneous appraisal of his character. His build was that of a
gladiator. He stood six-feet-four in height, with Herculean shoulders
and arms, and a pair of legs that suggested nothing so much as the
great pillars which supported the facade of the Ames building. Those
arms and legs, and those great back-muscles, had sent his college
shell to victory every year that he had sat in the boat. They had won
every game on the gridiron in which he had participated as the
greatest "center" the college ever developed. For baseball he was a
bit t