ut for the blundering credulity of
rascals, would honest men ever get their dues? Roebuck's brokers had bought
many thousands of Langdon's shares at the high artificial price before
Roebuck grasped the situation--that it was not my followers recklessly
gambling to break the prices, but Langdon unloading on his "pal." As soon
as he saw, he abruptly withdrew from the market. When the Stock Exchange
closed, National Coal securities were offered at prices ranging from eleven
for the bonds to two for the common and three for the preferred--offered,
and no takers.

"Well, you've done it," said Joe, coming with the news that Thornley, of
the Discount and Deposit Bank, had been appointed receiver.

"I've made a beginning," replied I. And the last sentence of my next
morning's "letter" was:

"To-morrow the first chapter of the History of the Industrial National
Bank."

* * * * *

"I have felt for two years," said Roebuck to Schilling, who repeated it to
me soon afterward, "that Blacklock was about the most dangerous fellow in
the country. The first time I set eyes on him, I saw he was a born
iconoclast. And I've known for a year that some day he would use that
engine of publicity of his to cannonade the foundations of society."

"He knew me better than I knew myself," was my comment to Schilling. And I
meant it--for I had not finished the demolition of the Coal combine when I
began to realize that, whatever I might have thought of my own ambitions,
I could never have tamed myself or been tamed into a devotee of dollars
and of respectability. I simply had been keeping quiet until my tools were
sharp and fate spun my opportunity within reach. But I must, in fairness,
add, it was lucky for me that, when the hour struck, Roebuck was not twenty
years younger and one-twentieth as rich. It's a heavy enough handicap,
under the best of circumstances, to go to war burdened with years; add the
burden of a monster fortune, and it isn't in human nature to fight well.
Youth and a light knapsack!

But--to my fight on the big bank.

Until I opened fire, the public thought, in a general way, that a bank was
an institution like Thornley's Discount and Deposit National--a place for
the safe-keeping of money and for accommodating business men with loans to
be used in carrying on and extending legitimate and useful enterprises. And
there were many such banks. But the real object of the banking business,
as exp