are
inscrutable eyes which seem to have a challenge in their gaze, a sort of
"look-me-over-as-long-as-you-like-and-you'll-never-guess-what's-under-the-surface"
expression that is baffling and provocative. Yet this sybarite, this
daring coward, this stingy prodigal, this sincere hypocrite, this
extraordinary blending of contradictory qualities, is the man who from
1887 to 1892 made Boston look like the proverbial country gawk at
circus-time.

Power the man certainly has, and of a distinct quality, yet his
intimates cannot explain the reason of their obedience to him. After a
brief acquaintance he is revealed as the very soul of insincerity--he
"works" his friends, he pays toll to his enemies, he frankly shows
himself without the sense of moral obligation. I believe his talent
resides in his capacity to select the proper type of man to "make rich"
in the illicit schemes his abnormal mind conceives. These coworkers of
his are of different grades; some have a super-abundance of cash; others
a desire to get it--in common are their lack of principle and dearth of
brains. Addicks cannot do business long with men of real ability, nor
does he understand them, whereas he can read the minds of his ordained
victims as if they were an open book. The big men who have encountered
or been associated with Addicks are prone to characterize him as a
mountebank, a joker, or a chump.

CHAPTER X

ADDICKS COMES TO BOSTON

J. Edward O'Sullivan Addicks was born in Philadelphia in 1841, and was
in the eighties plodding along the ordinary, uneventful path of a seller
of flour to the people of that city which since the death of William
Penn holds the record for the highest and densest percentage of sleep
per capita of any English-speaking community.

In the eighties two things happened that changed the whole course of J.
Edward O'Sullivan Addicks' life. Some one invented water-gas and "let
in" Addicks on the invention; and the Philadelphia branch of the
"Standard Oil," represented by Widener, Elkins, and Dolan, "trustified"
the gas companies of the city of Chicago, which enabled Addicks to "hold
up" the "trustification" until Dolan and Dolan's associates paid him the
sum of $300,000 for the instrument with which he had done the holding
up, $10,000 worth of the stock of one of the necessary Chicago
companies.

The law of compensation, which gets in its deadly work on all the
prettiest plans of man, but decreed that what goes up must