n I say cowardly skunks, I mean just that,--cowardly skunks. They
set up for a lot of gamblers, and there ain't one in a thousand of them
that's got the nerve to be a gambler. They're four-flushers, if you
know what that means. They're a lot of little cottontail rabbits making
believe they're big rip-snorting timber wolves. They set out to
everlastingly eat up some proposition but at the first sign of trouble
they turn tail and stampede for the brush. Look how it works. When
the big fellows wanted to unload Little Copper, they sent Jakey Fallow
into the New York Stock Exchange to yell out: 'I'll buy all or any part
of Little Copper at fifty five,' Little Copper being at fifty-four.
And in thirty minutes them cottontails--financiers, some folks call
them--bid up Little Copper to sixty. And an hour after that, stampeding
for the brush, they were throwing Little Copper overboard at forty-five
and even forty.

"They're catspaws for the big fellows. Almost as fast as they rob the
suckers, the big fellows come along and hold them up. Or else the big
fellows use them in order to rob each other. That's the way the
Chattanooga Coal and Iron Company was swallowed up by the trust in the
last panic. The trust made that panic. It had to break a couple of
big banking companies and squeeze half a dozen big fellows, too, and it
did it by stampeding the cottontails. The cottontails did the rest all
right, and the trust gathered in Chattanooga Coal and Iron. Why, any
man, with nerve and savvee, can start them cottontails jumping for the
brush. I don't exactly hate them myself, but I haven't any regard for
chicken-hearted four-flushers."

CHAPTER XVII

For months Daylight was buried in work. The outlay was terrific, and
there was nothing coming in. Beyond a general rise in land values,
Oakland had not acknowledged his irruption on the financial scene. The
city was waiting for him to show what he was going to do, and he lost
no time about it. The best skilled brains on the market were hired by
him for the different branches of the work. Initial mistakes he had no
patience with, and he was determined to start right, as when he engaged
Wilkinson, almost doubling his big salary, and brought him out from
Chicago to take charge of the street railway organization. Night and
day the road gangs toiled on the streets. And night and day the
pile-drivers hammered the big piles down into the mud of San Francisco
Bay. The pi