“I tell you,” Flint was asserting as they swung into Broadway, at Twenty-third Street, and headed for South Ferry, “I tell you, Wally, the thing is growing vaster and more potent every moment.  The longer I look at it, the huger its possibilities loom up!  With air under our control, as a source of manufacturing alone, we can pull down perfectly inconceivable fortunes.  We shan’t have to send anywhere for our raw material.  It will come to us; it’s everywhere.  No cost for transportation, to begin with.

“With oxygen, nitrogen and liquid air as products, think of the possibilities, will you?  Not an ice-plant in the country could compete with us, in the refrigerating line.  With liquid air, we could sweep that market clean.  By installing it on our fruit cars and boats, and our beef cars, the saving effected in many ways would run to millions.  The sale of nitrogen, for fertilizer, would net us billions.  And, above all, the control of the world’s air supply, for breathing, would make us the absolute, undisputed masters of mankind!

“We’d have the world by the windpipe.  Its very life-breath would be at our disposal.  Ha!  What about revolution, then?  What about popular discontent, and stiff-necked legislators, and cranky editors?  What about commercial and financial rivals?  What about these damned Socialists, with their brass-lunged bazoo, howling about monopoly and capitalism and all the rest of it?  Eh, what?  Just one squeeze,” here Flint closed his corded, veinous fingers, “just one tightening of the fist, and—­all over!  We win, hands down!”

“Like shutting the wind off from a runaway horse, eh?” suggested Waldron, squinting at his cigar as though to hide the involuntary gleam of light that sparkled in his narrow-set eyes.

“Precisely!” assented Flint, smiling his gold-toothed smile.  “The wildest bolter has got to stop, or fall dead, once you close his nostrils.  That’s what we’ll do to the world, Wally.  We’ll get it by the throat—­and there you are!”

“Yes, there we are,” repeated Waldron, “but—­”

“But what, now?”

Waldron did not answer, for a moment, but squinted up at the tall buildings, temples of Mammon and of Greed, filled from pave to cornice with toiling, sweated hordes of men and women, all laboring for Capitalism; many of them, directly or indirectly, for him.  Then, as the limousine slowed at Spring Street, to let a cross-town car pass—­a car whose earnings he and Flint both shared, just as they shared those of every surface and subway and “L” car in the vast metropolis—­he said: 

“Have you weighed the consequences carefully, Flint?  Quite carefully?  This thing of cornering all the oxygen is a pretty big proposition.  Do you think you really ought to undertake it?”

“Why not?”

“Have you considered the frightful suffering and loss of life it might entail?  Almost certainly would entail?  Are you quite sure you want to take the world by the throat and—­and choke it?  For money?”