“Damnation!” he was saying, as he shook a newly-received aerogram at his partner.  “What’s this, I’d like to know?  What does this mean?  All telegraphic communication west of Chicago has suddenly stopped, and from half a dozen points in the Southern States news is coming in that railway service is being interrupted!  See here, Waldron, this won’t do!  Your part of the business has always been to carry on the publicity end, the newspaper end, the moulding of public opinion and political thought, and the maintenance of free, clear rail and aero communication everywhere, all over the world.  But now, all at once, see here?”

Waldron raised red, bleared eyes at his irate partner.  He, too, was more the beast than four years ago.  No less the tiger, now, but more the pig.  High, evil living had done its work on him.  An unhealthy purple suffused his heavily-jowled face.  Beneath his eyes, sodden bags of flesh hung pendant.  His lips, loose and lascivious, now sucked indolently at the costly cigar he was smoking as he sat leaning far back in his desk-chair.  And so those two, angry accuser and indifferent accused, faced each other for a moment; while, incessant, dull, mighty, the thunders of the giant cataract mingled with the trembling diapason of the stupendous turbines in the rock-hewn caverns where old Niagara now toiled in fetters, to swell their power and fling gold into their bottomless coffers.

“See here!” Flint repeated angrily, once more shaking the dispatches at his mate.  “Even our wireless system, all over the west and southwest, has quit working!  And you sit there staring at me like—­like—­”

“That’ll do, Flint!” the younger man retorted in a rough, hoarse voice.  “If there’s any trouble, I’ll find it and repair it.  Very well.  But I’ll not be talked to in any such way.  Damn it, you can’t speak to me Flint, as if I were one of the people!  If you own half the earth, I’ll have you understand I own the other half.  So go easy, Flint—­go damned easy!”

Malevolently he eyed the old man’s beast-like face.  The scorn and dislike he had conceived for Flint, years ago, when Flint had failed to win back Catherine to him, had long grown keener and more bitter.  Waldron took it as a personal affront that Flint, apparently so worn and feeble, could still hang on to life and brains enough to dominate the enterprise.  A thousand times, if once, he had wished Flint well dead and buried and out of the way, so that he, Waldron, could grasp the whole circle of the stupendous Air Trust.  This, his supreme ambition, had been constantly curbed by Flint’s survival; and as the months and years had passed, his hate had grown more deep, more ugly, more venomous.

“Why, curse it,” Waldron often thought, “the old dope has taken enough morphine in his lifetime to have killed a hundred ordinary men!  And yet he still clings on, and withers, and grows yellow like an old dead leaf that will not drop from the tree!  When will he drop?  When will Father Time pick the despicable antique?  My God, is the man immortal?”