and mine, and when the collapse comes every one will look for the victim, and that victim will be you. Even your best friend will say if you were going to turn informer you should have been smart enough to have discovered your mare's nest before you let it grow so big. Look at it, Lawson, look at it, and in the name of everything that is reasonable get back your senses."
My readers must remember that the Henry H. Rogers I am portraying here is no ordinary man, but the strongest, most acute, and most persuasive human being that in the thirty-five active years of my life I have encountered. And on me all the magic of his wonderful individuality, all the resources of his fertile mind, all the histrionic power of his dramatic personality were concentrated. His logic was resistless. As he spun the web of his argument my position seemed hopeless; even more forcible than his reasoning was the graphic recital of how both increases had been made. His eyes watered as he spoke. They were not his proposals, but Stillman's and the others' who had been let in on the several floors, but to whom he had never explained my rights nor my position in the enterprise.
"The truth is, Lawson," he said—"and I'll not mince matters further: From the beginning I have done business with you on a basis entirely different from that on which it is our rule to deal with agents or associates. At the start I expected that you would, as all others have done, fall into our ways. Instead, you have grown more stubborn, and the result is, I have been forced into all kinds of holes, some of which I have not even let William Rockefeller know about. Here at last I am in between the grinders. I cannot go to such men as Stillman and Morgan and admit that you are the one who has been doing this copper business that I have had them think I was doing myself. You would not ask me to put myself in such a humiliating position. Think what John D. Rockefeller would say of such a confession. It's impossible. And when these associates of mine get down to this matter and all agree upon the