“I might as well cap it with a plunge,” he told himself, and, lifting his hands above his head, launched outward in a graceful arc.

Yamuro came back a moment later and looked about the empty gymnasium.  His face suddenly went pale.  “Mr. Burton—­please!” he screamed, and in his excitement his voice was more than ordinarily sibilant.  Then he turned on the pool light and rushed frantically back.  It had not occurred to him to warn his chief that that afternoon the basin had been emptied and repaired, and that below the diving-board were only six inches of water—­just enough to give back, in semi-darkness, a liquid reflection, and, beneath that, solid slabs of marble.

Yamuro peered over the edge and a deep groan broke from him.  At the bottom lay the figure of Hamilton Burton, with its head bent to one side.  It lay very still, and the water was slowly coloring from a wound in the scalp.

CHAPTER XXV

Hamilton Burton had always denied with scorn the existence of blind luck as an element in human greatness or failure.  Now if he had leaped head-foremost into an empty swimming pool, at the exact moment when he stood midway of an enterprise which should crown him as omnipotent—­or ruin him, perhaps it was a thing beyond coincidence.  Yesterday he had aligned colossal forces for today’s conflict—­and taken his toll of vengeance.  Today he must turn to profit the chaos he had wrought to that end through plans known only to himself—­and today he lay with a fractured skull, sleeping the sleep of unconsciousness.

Today every hand in the world of finance was turned against him with the desperation of a struggle for survival—­save those of his own lieutenants who were leaderless.  All the way down the line from the Department of Justice to the small sufferers of the provinces a slogan of war without quarter sounded against the most hated man in America.  That such would be the case he had known yesterday, but he also knew—­or thought he did—­that his directing hand would still be on the tiller and his uncannily shrewd brain would be puzzling, bewildering and deluding his enemies into unwittingly serving his ends.

From the morning papers the secret of his accident had been successfully withheld.  So the press of the country sounded forth a united thunder-peal of stinging and bitter anathema, pillorying Hamilton M. Burton as the most menacing of all public enemies and an ogre who had in a single day fattened his already superlative wealth on the sufferings, the starvation and the lives of his victims.  Editorial pages from Park row to a thousand main streets, double-leaded and double-columned their clamorous demand that such a plunderer should be nailed to the cross of punishment.  Burton-phobia was epidemic.  At first the physicians who gathered in his darkened room would not commit themselves to any promise of recovery.  The skull was fractured.  Ahead lay a long illness at best—­after that—­but here they left off words and resorted to a non-committal shrugging of frock-coated shoulders.