“Not yet,” he answered.

“He’s a character,” said she.  “I’ve heard Davy tell about the first time he struck New York—­as a miner, with huge wads of greenbacks in his pockets.  He spent his money like a ‘coal-oil Johnny,’ as the phrase is—­a hundred-dollar bill for a shine, and that sort of thing.  And he’d go on the wildest debauches; you can have no idea of it.”

“Is he that kind of a man?” said Montague.

“He used to be,” said the other.  “But one day he had something the matter with him, and he went to a doctor, and the doctor told him something, I don’t know what, and he shut down like a steel trap.  Now he never drinks a drop, and he lives on one meal a day and a cup of coffee.  But he still goes with the old crowd—­I don’t believe there is a politician or a sporting-man in town that Johnny Price does not know.  He sits in their haunts and talks with them until all sorts of hours in the morning, but I can never get him to come to my dinner-parties.  ‘My people are human,’ he will say; ’yours are sawdust.’  Sometime, if you want to see New York, just get Johnny Price to take you about and introduce you to his bookmakers and burglars!”

Montague meditated for a while over his friend’s picture.  “Somehow or other,” he said, “it doesn’t sound much like the president of a hundred-million-dollar corporation.”

“That’s all right,” said Mrs. Billy, “but Price will be at his desk bright and early the next morning, and every man in the office will be there, too.  And if you think he won’t have his wits about him, just you try to fool him on some deal, and see.  Let me tell you a little that I know about the fight he has made with the Mississippi Steel Company.”  And she went on to tell.  The upshot of her telling was that Montague borrowed the use of her desk and wrote a note to Stanley Ryder.  “From my inquiries about John S. Price, I gather that he makes steel.  With the understanding that I am to make a railroad and carry his steel, I have concluded to accept your proposition, subject, of course, to a satisfactory arrangement as to terms.”

CHAPTER XI

The next morning Montague had an interview with John S. Price in his Wall Street office, and was retained as counsel in connection with the new reorganisation.  He accepted the offer, and in the afternoon he called by appointment at the law-offices of William E. Davenant.

The first person Montague met there was Harry Curtiss, who greeted him with eagerness.  “I was pleased to death when I heard that you were in on this deal,” said he; “we shall have some work to do together.”