after department, a score of them, and hundreds of
clerks and stenographers. As he told Dede:
“I’ve got more companies than you can shake
a stick at. There’s the Alameda & Contra
Costa Land Syndicate, the Consolidated Street Railways,
the Yerba Buena Ferry Company, the United Water Company,
the Piedmont Realty Company, the Fairview and Portola
Hotel Company, and half a dozen more that I’ve
got to refer to a notebook to remember. There’s
the Piedmont Laundry Farm, and Redwood Consolidated
Quarries. Starting in with our quarry, I just
kept a-going till I got them all. And there’s
the ship-building company I ain’t got a name
for yet. Seeing as I had to have ferry-boats,
I decided to build them myself. They’ll
be done by the time the pier is ready for them.
Phew! It all sure beats poker. And I’ve
had the fun of gouging the robber gangs as well.
The water company bunches are squealing yet.
I sure got them where the hair was short. They
were just about all in when I came along and finished
them off.”
“But why do you hate them so?” Dede asked.
“Because they’re such cowardly skunks.”
“But you play the same game they do.”
“Yes; but not in the same way.”
Daylight regarded her thoughtfully. “When
I say cowardly skunks, I mean just that,—cowardly
skunks. They set up for a lot of gamblers, and
there ain’t one in a thousand of them that’s
got the nerve to be a gambler. They’re
four-flushers, if you know what that means. They’re
a lot of little cottontail rabbits making believe they’re
big rip-snorting timber wolves. They set out
to everlastingly eat up some proposition but at the
first sign of trouble they turn tail and stampede
for the brush. Look how it works. When
the big fellows wanted to unload Little Copper, they
sent Jakey Fallow into the New York Stock Exchange
to yell out: ’I’ll buy all or any
part of Little Copper at fifty five,’ Little
Copper being at fifty-four. And in thirty minutes
them cottontails— financiers, some folks
call them—bid up Little Copper to sixty.
And an hour after that, stampeding for the brush, they
were throwing Little Copper overboard at forty-five
and even forty.
“They’re catspaws for the big fellows.
Almost as fast as they rob the suckers, the big fellows
come along and hold them up. Or else the big
fellows use them in order to rob each other.
That’s the way the Chattanooga Coal and Iron
Company was swallowed up by the trust in the last
panic. The trust made that panic. It had
to break a couple of big banking companies and squeeze
half a dozen big fellows, too, and it did it by stampeding
the cottontails. The cottontails did the rest
all right, and the trust gathered in Chattanooga Coal
and Iron. Why, any man, with nerve and savvee,
can start them cottontails jumping for the brush.
I don’t exactly hate them myself, but I haven’t
any regard for chicken-hearted four-flushers.”
