re strewn along Wall Street, that sinister
thoroughfare which, as a wit has said, has a graveyard at one end
and the river at the other! Had Ryder any twinges of conscience?
Hardly. Had he not made a cool twenty millions by the deal?

Yet this commercial pirate, this Napoleon of finance, was not a
wholly bad man. He had his redeeming qualities, like most bad men.
His most pronounced weakness, and the one that had made him the
most conspicuous man of his time, was an entire lack of moral
principle. No honest or honourable man could have amassed such
stupendous wealth. In other words, John Ryder had not been
equipped by Nature with a conscience. He had no sense of right, or
wrong, or justice where his own interests were concerned. He was
the prince of egoists. On the other hand, he possessed qualities
which, with some people, count as virtues. He was pious and
regular in his attendance at church and, while he had done but
little for charity, he was known to have encouraged the giving of
alms by the members of his family, which consisted of a wife,
whose timid voice was rarely heard, and a son Jefferson, who was
the destined successor to his gigantic estate.

Such was the man who was the real power behind the Southern and
Transcontinental Railroad. More than anyone else Ryder had been
aroused by the present legal action, not so much for the money
interest at stake as that any one should dare to thwart his will.
It had been a pet scheme of his, this purchase for a song, when
the land was cheap, of some thousand acres along the line, and it
is true that at the time of the purchase there had been some idea
of laying the land out as a park. But real estate values had
increased in astonishing fashion, the road could no longer afford
to carry out the original scheme, and had attempted to dispose of
the property for building purposes, including a right of way for a
branch road. The news, made public in the newspapers, had raised a
storm of protest. The people in the vicinity claimed that the
railroad secured the land on the express condition of a park being
laid out, and in order to make a legal test they had secured an
injunction, which had been sustained by Judge Rossmore of the
United States Circuit Court.

These details were hastily told and re-told by one clerk to
another as the babel of voices in the inner room grew louder, and
more directors kept arriving from the ever-busy elevators. The
meeting was called for three