his grandfather. When its eyes met his he flushed and
shifted his gaze guiltily. "Must have been something I ate for
breakfast," he muttered to the portrait and to himself in apologetic
explanation of his breakdown.

In a distant part of the field all this time was posted the
commander-in-chief of the army of attack. Like all wise commanders in
all well-conducted battles, he was far removed from the blinding smoke,
from the distracting confusion. He had placed himself where he could
hear, see, instantly direct, without being disturbed by trifling
reverse or success, by unimportant rumors to vast proportions blown.

To play his game for dominion or destruction John Dumont had had
himself arrayed in a wine-colored, wadded silk dressing-gown over his
white silk pajamas and had stretched himself on a divan in his
sitting-room in his palace. A telephone and a stock-ticker within easy
reach were his field-glasses and his aides--the stock-ticker would show
him second by second the precise posture of the battle; the telephone
would enable him to direct it to the minutest manoeuver.

The telephone led to the ear of his chief of staff, Tavistock, who was
at his desk in his privatest office in the Mills Building, about him
telephones straight to the ears of the division commanders. None of
these knew who was his commander; indeed, none knew that there was to
be a battle or, after the battle was on, that they were part of one of
its two contending armies. They would blindly obey orders, ignorant
who was aiming the guns they fired and at whom those guns were aimed.
Such conditions would have been fatal to the barbaric struggles for
supremacy which ambition has waged through all the past; they are ideal
conditions for these modern conflicts of the market which more and more
absorb the ambitions of men. Instead of shot and shell and regiments
of "cannon food," there are battalions of capital, the paper
certificates of the stored-up toil or trickery of men; instead of
mangled bodies and dead, there are minds in the torment of financial
peril or numb with the despair of financial ruin. But the stakes are
the same old stakes--power and glory and wealth for a few, thousands on
thousands dragged or cozened into the battle in whose victory they
share scantily, if at all, although they bear its heaviest losses on
both sides.

It was half-past eight o'clock when Dumont put the receiver to his ear
and greeted Tavistock in a stro