father, whom alone he had respected and perhaps loved.

He began to tower above the financial situation. Soon his name was current in
the bourses of the world. One who spoke the name of Manderson called up a
vision of all that was broad-based and firm in the vast wealth of the United
States. He planned great combinations of capital, drew together and
centralized industries of continental scope, financed with unerring judgement
the large designs of state or of private enterprise. Many a time when he 'took
hold' to smash a strike, or to federate the ownership of some great field of
labour, he sent ruin upon a multitude of tiny homes; and if miners or
steelworkers or cattlemen defied him and invoked disorder, he could be more
lawless and ruthless than they. But this was done in the pursuit of legitimate
business ends. Tens of thousands of the poor might curse his name, but the
financier and the speculator execrated him no more. He stretched a hand to
protect or to manipulate the power of wealth in every corner of the country.
Forcible, cold, and unerring, in all he did he ministered to the national lust
for magnitude; and a grateful country surnamed him the Colossus.

But there was an aspect of Manderson in this later period that lay long
unknown and unsuspected save by a few, his secretaries and lieutenants and
certain of the associates of his bygone hurling time. This little circle knew
that Manderson, the pillar of sound business and stability in the markets, had
his hours of nostalgia for the lively times when the Street had trembled at
his name. It was, said one of them, as if Blackbeard had settled down as a
decent merchant in Bristol on the spoils of the Main. Now and then the pirate
would glare suddenly out, the knife in his teeth and the sulphur matches
sputtering in his hatband. During such spasms of reversion to type a score of
tempestuous raids upon the market had been planned on paper in the inner room
of the offices of Manderson, Colefax and Company. But they were never carried
out. Blackbeard would quell the mutiny of his old self within him and go