“What do you want to know about him for?” asked the General, after he had got through laughing over this recollection.

“It’s a case I’m concerned in,” the other answered.

“I tell you who knows about him,” said the General.  “Harry Curtiss.  William E. Davenant has done law business for Price.”

“Is that so?” said Montague.  “Then probably I shall meet Harry.”

“I can tell you a better person yet,” said the other, after a moment’s thought.  “Ask your friend Mrs. Alden; she knows Price intimately, I believe.”

So Montague sent up a note to Mrs. Billy, and the reply came, “Come up to dinner.  I am not going out.”  And so, late in the afternoon, he was ensconced in a big leather armchair in Mrs. Billy’s private drawing-room, and listening to an account of the owner of the Mississippi Steel Company.

“Johnny Price?” said the great lady.  “Yes, I know him.  It all depends whether you are going to have him for a friend or an enemy.  His mother was Irish, and he is built after her.  If he happens to take a fancy to you, he’ll die for you; and if you make him hate you, you will hear a greater variety of epithets than you ever supposed the language contained.—­I first met him in Washington,” Mrs. Billy went on, reminiscently; “that was fifteen years ago, when my brother was in Congress.  I think I told you once how Davy paid forty thousand dollars for the nomination, and went to Congress.  It was the year of a Democratic landslide, and they could have elected Reggie Mann if they had felt like it.  I went to Washington to live the next winter, and Price was there with a whole army of lobbyists, fighting for free silver.  That was before the craze, you know, when silver was respectable; and Price was the Silver King.  I saw the inside of American government that winter, I can assure you.”

“Tell me about it,” said Montague.

“The Democratic party had been elected on a low tariff platform,” said Mrs. Billy; “and it sold out bag and baggage to the corporations.  Money was as free as water—­my brother could have got his forty thousand back three times over.  It was the Steel crowd that bossed the job, you know—­William Roberts used to come down from Pittsburg every two or three days, and he had a private telephone wire the rest of the time.  I have always said it was the Steel Trust that clamped the tariff swindle on the American people, and that’s held it there ever since.”

“What did Price do with his silver mines?” asked Montague.

“He sold them,” said she, “and just in the nick of time.  He was on the inside in the campaign of ’96, and I remember one night he came to dinner at our house and told us that the Republican party had raised ten or fifteen million dollars to buy the election.  ’That’s the end of silver,’ he said, and he sold out that very month, and he’s been freelancing it in Wall Street ever since.”

“Have you met him yet?” asked Mrs. Billy, after a pause.