but took a cab straight for his rooms, where he had telegraphed Eaton
to meet him with the general superintendent of all his properties and
his private secretary, Smythe. For nearly a week his finger had been
off the pulse of the situation, and he wanted to get in touch again as
soon as possible. For in a struggle as tense as the one between him and
the trust, a hundred vital things might have happened in that time. He
might be coming back to catastrophe and ruin, brought about while he
had been a prisoner to love in that snow-bound cabin.

Prisoner to love he had been and still was, but the business men who
met him at his rooms, fellow adventurers in the forlorn hope he had
hitherto led with such signal success, could have read nothing of this
in the marble, chiseled face of their sagacious general, so indomitable
of attack and insatiate of success. His steel-hard eyes gave no hint of
the Arcadia they had inhabited so eagerly a short twenty-four hours
before. The intoxicating madness he had known was chained deep within
him. Once more he had a grip on himself; was sheathed in a cannonproof
plate armor of selfishness. No more magic nights of starshine,
breathing fire and dew; no more lifted moments of exaltation stinging
him to a pulsating wonder at life's wild delight. He was again the
inexorable driver of men, with no pity for their weaknesses any more
than for his own.

The men whom he found waiting for him at his rooms were all young
Westerners picked out by him because he thought them courageous,
unscrupulous and loyal. Like him, they were privateers in the seas of
commerce, and sailed under no flag except the one of insurrection he
had floated. But all of them, though they were associated with him and
hoped to ride to fortune on the wave that carried him there, recognized
themselves as subordinates in the enterprises he undertook. They were
merely heads of departments, and they took orders like trusted clerks
with whom the owner sometimes unbends and advises.

Now he heard their reports, asked an occasional searching question, and
swiftly gave decisions of far-reaching import. It was past midnight
before he had finished with them, and instead of retiring for the sleep
he might have been expected to need, he spent the rest of the night
inspecting the actual workings of the properties he had not seen for
six days. Hour after hour he passed examining the developments,
sometimes in the breasts of the workings and a