e gesture with which the younger Warwick invited them to be
seated. In the brief silence that followed upon their entrance was the
portent of a brewing tempest. At last Malone said crisply:

"I sent for you, Mr. Burton. Most men come to me when I send for them."

"In several respects I differ from most men." The reply was too quiet to
ring flippant. It was merely the assurance of invincible self-faith, and
for an instant the man who had not in years been compelled to soften the
iron grip of his mastery gazed his astonishment.

Then Malone burst into an oriflamme of anger. He was a whirlwind of fury
before whose raging any small or timid man must have shriveled. The eyes
that shone out under the heavy lashes as he paced the place, with
clenched hands, were batteries raining shrapnel of wrath.

From their gray depths they blackened into ink, across which shot the
red and yellow flocks of a fiery and passionate autocracy. The iron jaw,
inherited from seafaring forefathers, snapped on words of threat,
rebuke, and invective. He wore his sixty-five years as lightly as
foliage, standing straight and strong like a poplar tree, save as he
bent to the gusts of his own passion. Where his clenched fist fell upon
desk or table the furniture trembled. Through the frosted glass of the
door Hamilton Burton saw the shadows of hurrying figures and knew that
the secretaries and stenographers out there were in a flutter of uneasy
excitement. Wall street knew what it meant when the "old man" was on the
rampage.

While this tempest endured the nervous-looking man took a chair and sat
silent. His attitude was hunched up and he chewed on his unlighted
cigar, while his restless gaze traveled here, there, everywhere. On
casual glance one might have overlooked him as negligible, thereby
falling gravely into error. The giant and the slight man had this
kinship, that in the workings of great finance they were mainspring and
balance wheel, and at their prompting many divisions of the world's
industrial armies marched or marked time.

Suddenly J.J. Malone fell silent, and then Hamilton Burton spoke. He
spoke with a surprising calm for one of his uncompromising arrogance.
Perhaps it accorded with his whim to chill his words with icy insolence
that they might cut the more and point the greater contrast when he
chose to unleash his own hot wrath.

"You sent for me, Malone. I declined to come to you. Then you came to
me. As yet you have shown no r