with plans for a bear raid. Watch him. Send word
of his first move. The time is ripe for an avalanche."

Suddenly around one post voices rose. They went from calm to shouts,
from shouts to yells, then broke in a crescendo of turmoil. Collars came
loose and voices grew hoarse. The restrained anxiety had swept into an
open furore of fear. It looked as if the bottom were dropping out of
Coal Tar Products. At once a dozen operators raced for their telephones.
Hamilton Burton had struck, and his first blow was on Coal Tars! That
was the whispered word that ran like wild fire.

While this turbulence was going forward, Hamilton Burton sat in his
twentieth-floor office, gazing fixedly up at a portrait of Napoleon.
About the walls were several other portraits of the emperor. Busts in
bronze and marble gazed down with those same inscrutable eyes. One
important likeness was missing. It was that which shows the face of a
man broken in defeat--the wistful St. Helena eyes that seem always
brooding out over the ruins of mighty dreams.

Carl Bristoll opened the door, and the musing face turned with the
impatient frown of a broken revery.

"Mr. Malone's secretary on the 'phone," announced the young man. "Mr.
Malone wants to know if you can come at once to his office."

"Tell Mr. Malone"--Burton snapped his words out irritably--"that if he
wants to find me I will be here in my own office for just thirty
minutes."

The employee hesitated in momentary embarrassment, then he added:

"Of course, you know that I mean J.J. Malone himself, sir?"

Burton laughed. "In the world of finance, Carl, I didn't know there
_was_ more than one Malone."

Also, reflected the secretary as he closed the door behind him, there
was in the world of finance only one who would care to ignore a summons
from that source.

A few minutes afterward the door opened again, opened to frame the bulky
figure of a man who had swept by those who sought to announce his
coming. The heavy brows of J.J. Malone were contracted over smoldering
gray eyes which many men feared and all but a few obeyed. At his elbow
followed the slight wiry figure of a companion with nervous eyes, and a
cigar which was always chewed and never lighted. This man had come, as
Ham had come, from the hardness of some barren farm and had obdurately
hammered his path by the sheer insistence of his brain into the inner
circle of an oligarchy. These two greatest of America's money barons
ignored th