The Lion and the Mouse | Page 3

a
genius born of the railroad age. No other age could have brought him
forth; his peculiar talents fitted exactly the conditions of his time.
Attracted early in life to the newly discovered oil fields of
Pennsylvania, he became a dealer in the raw product and later a refiner,
acquiring with capital, laboriously saved, first one refinery, then
another. The railroads were cutting each other's throats to secure the
freight business of the oil men, and John Burkett Ryder saw his
opportunity. He made secret overtures to the road, guaranteeing a vast
amount of business if he could get exceptionally low rates, and the
illegal compact was made. His competitors, undersold in the market,
stood no chance, and one by one they were crushed out of existence.
Ryder called these manouvres "business"; the world called them
brigandage. But the Colossus prospered and slowly built up the
foundations of the extraordinary fortune which is the talk and the
wonder of the world today. Master now of the oil situation, Ryder
succeeded in his ambition of organizing the Empire Trading Company,
the most powerful, the most secretive, and the most wealthy business
institution the commercial world has yet known.
Yet with all this success John Burkett Ryder was still not content. He
was now a rich man, richer by many millions that he had dreamed he
could ever be, but still he was unsatisfied. He became money mad. He
wanted to be richer still, to be the richest man in the world, the richest
man the world had ever known. And the richer he got the stronger the
idea grew upon him with all the force of a morbid obsession. He
thought of money by day, he dreamt of it at night. No matter by what
questionable device it was to be procured, more gold and more must
flow into his already overflowing coffers. So each day, instead of

spending the rest of his years in peace, in the enjoyment of the wealth
he had accumulated, he went downtown like any twenty-dollar-a-week
clerk to the tall building in lower Broadway and, closeted with his
associates, toiled and plotted to make more money.
He acquired vast copper mines and secured control of this and that
railroad. He had invested heavily in the Southern and Transcontinental
road and was chairman of its board of directors. Then he and his
fellow-conspirators planned a great financial coup. The millions were
not coming in fast enough. They must make a hundred millions at one
stroke. They floated a great mining company to which the public was
invited to subscribe. The scheme having the endorsement of the Empire
Trading Company no one suspected a snare, and such was the magic of
John Ryder's name that gold flowed in from every point of the compass.
The stock sold away above par the day it was issued. Men deemed
themselves fortunate if they were even granted an allotment. What
matter if, a few days later, the house of cards came tumbling down, and
a dozen suicides were strewn along Wall Street, that sinister
thoroughfare which, as a wit has said, has a graveyard at one end and
the river at the other! Had Ryder any twinges of conscience? Hardly.
Had he not made a cool twenty millions by the deal?
Yet this commercial pirate, this Napoleon of finance, was not a wholly
bad man. He had his redeeming qualities, like most bad men. His most
pronounced weakness, and the one that had made him the most
conspicuous man of his time, was an entire lack of moral principle. No
honest or honourable man could have amassed such stupendous wealth.
In other words, John Ryder had not been equipped by Nature with a
conscience. He had no sense of right, or wrong, or justice where his
own interests were concerned. He was the prince of egoists. On the
other hand, he possessed qualities which, with some people, count as
virtues. He was pious and regular in his attendance at church and, while
he had done but little for charity, he was known to have encouraged the
giving of alms by the members of his family, which consisted of a wife,
whose timid voice was rarely heard, and a son Jefferson, who was the
destined successor to his gigantic estate.

Such was the man who was the real power behind the Southern and
Transcontinental Railroad. More than anyone else Ryder had been
aroused by the present legal action, not so much for the money interest
at stake as that any one should dare to thwart his will. It had been a pet
scheme of his, this purchase for a song, when the land was cheap, of
some thousand acres along the line, and it is true that at the time of the
purchase there