situation I have not only made but put myself into—to try to sell to the investors of this country other property than that I have promised them they were to have? You cannot mean that—you surely cannot, for you and all your 'Standard Oil,' even though you were many times bigger than you are, would never have dared to tell it to me face to face."
I was boiling over—becoming literally frenzied at the picture unrolling before me.
Now it was Mr. Rogers' turn to be aroused. His voice quivered with intensity and his fist came down on his desk with a force that shook the inkstand. It flashed into my brain that this anger was assumed to cow me, and I tried to look through his eyes on to his mind tablets back of them, and read what was there recorded. The gaze that met mine was polished steel ice coated, off which my glances slipped and slid. I dropped into my chair.
"In the name of all that's sensible, Lawson, hear me out and quit acting like a child." He stopped a second and then went on impressively. "In looking over the copper field I discovered a number of things you failed to see. First, that Haggin and Tevis, who own Anaconda with Marcus Daly, have grown so wealthy that they have left the management of their Montana copper and silver properties entirely to Daly, and he has been coddling the mines along, saying nothing about their real worth and quietly passing by the richest parts, awaiting the day when he could buy his partners out. Shortly after you let it be known that we were to go into 'Coppers,' Daly came to me to talk things over, and it took me only a short time to get under his waistcoat and find just what he had out there, and it took me still less time to decide that he offered something a little better than anything we had yet turned up. These properties, which we can secure for $24,000,000, which will carry with them the majority of the 1,200,000 shares of Anaconda, alone are worth $75,000,000, and