Full Text Archive

Full Text Archive
https://www.fulltextarchive.com
thousand dollars by to-morrow noon, at the very latest, I'm through, and so are you. There is not
a thing the matter with our situation. Those stocks of ours are as good to-day as they ever were.
Why, great heavens, man, the railways are there behind them. They're paying. The
Seventeenth and Nineteenth Street line is earning one thousand dollars a day right now. What
better evidence do you want than that? Green & Coates is earning five hundred dollars. You're
frightened, George. These damned political schemers have scared you. Why, you've as good a
right to loan that money as Bode and Murtagh had before you. They did it. You've been doing it
for Mollenhauer and the others, only so long as you do it for them it's all right. What's a
designated city depository but a loan?"
Cowperwood was referring to the system under which certain portions of city money, like the
sinking-fund, were permitted to be kept in certain banks at a low rate of interest or no
rate--banks in which Mollenhauer and Butler and Simpson were interested. This was their safe
graft.
"Don't throw your chances away, George. Don't quit now. You'll be worth millions in a few years,
and you won't have to turn a hand. All you will have to do will be to keep what you have. If you
don't help me, mark my word, they'll throw you over the moment I'm out of this, and they'll let
you go to the penitentiary. Who's going to put up five hundred thousand dollars for you,
George? Where is Mollenhauer going to get it, or Butler, or anybody, in these times? They can't.
They don't intend to. When I'm through, you're through, and you'll be exposed quicker than any
one else. They can't hurt me, George. I'm an agent. I didn't ask you to come to me. You came to
me in the first place of your own accord. If you don't help me, you're through, I tell you, and
you're going to be sent to the penitentiary as sure as there are jails. Why don't you take a stand,
George? Why don't you stand your ground? You have your wife and children to look after. You
can't be any worse off loaning me three hundred thousand more than you are right now. What
difference does it make--five hundred thousand or eight hundred thousand? It's all one and the
same thing, if you're going to be tried for it. Besides, if you loan me this, there isn't going to be
any trial. I'm not going to fail. This storm will blow over in a week or ten days, and we'll be rich
again. For Heaven's sake, George, don't go to pieces this way! Be sensible! Be reasonable!"
He paused, for Stener's face had become a jelly-like mass of woe.
"I can't, Frank," he wailed. "I tell you I can't. They'll punish me worse than ever if I do that.
They'll never let up on me. You don't know these people."
In Stener's crumpling weakness Cowperwood read his own fate. What could you do with a man
like that? How brace him up? You couldn't! And with a gesture of infinite understanding, disgust,
noble indifference, he threw up his hands and started to walk out. At the door he turned.
"George," he said, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry for you, not for myself. I'll come out of things all right,
eventually. I'll be rich. But, George, you're making the one great mistake of your life. You'll be
poor; you'll be a convict, and you'll have only yourself to blame. There isn't a thing the matter
with this money situation except the fire. There isn't a thing wrong with my affairs except this
slump in stocks--this panic. You sit there, a fortune in your hands, and you allow a lot of
schemers, highbinders, who don't know any more of your affairs or mine than a rabbit, and who
haven't any interest in you except to plan what they can get out of you, to frighten you and
prevent you from doing the one thing that will save your life. Three hundred thousand paltry
dollars that in three or four weeks from now I can pay back to you four and five times over, and
144 / 312

---