had been
emptied and repaired, and that below the diving-board were only six
inches of water--just enough to give back, in semi-darkness, a liquid
reflection, and, beneath that, solid slabs of marble.

Yamuro peered over the edge and a deep groan broke from him. At the
bottom lay the figure of Hamilton Burton, with its head bent to one
side. It lay very still, and the water was slowly coloring from a wound
in the scalp.

CHAPTER XXV

Hamilton Burton had always denied with scorn the existence of blind luck
as an element in human greatness or failure. Now if he had leaped
head-foremost into an empty swimming pool, at the exact moment when he
stood midway of an enterprise which should crown him as omnipotent--or
ruin him, perhaps it was a thing beyond coincidence. Yesterday he had
aligned colossal forces for today's conflict--and taken his toll of
vengeance. Today he must turn to profit the chaos he had wrought to that
end through plans known only to himself--and today he lay with a
fractured skull, sleeping the sleep of unconsciousness.

Today every hand in the world of finance was turned against him with the
desperation of a struggle for survival--save those of his own
lieutenants who were leaderless. All the way down the line from the
Department of Justice to the small sufferers of the provinces a slogan
of war without quarter sounded against the most hated man in America.
That such would be the case he had known yesterday, but he also knew--or
thought he did--that his directing hand would still be on the tiller and
his uncannily shrewd brain would be puzzling, bewildering and deluding
his enemies into unwittingly serving his ends.

From the morning papers the secret of his accident had been successfully
withheld. So the press of the country sounded forth a united
thunder-peal of stinging and bitter anathema, pillorying Hamilton M.
Burton as the most menacing of all public enemies and an ogre who had in
a single day fattened his already superlative wealth on the sufferings,
the starvation and the lives of his victims. Editorial pages from Park
row to a thousand main streets, double-leaded and double-columned their
clamorous demand that such a plunderer should be nailed to the cross of
punishment. Burton-phobia was epidemic. At first the physicians who
gathered in his darkened room would not commit themselves to any promise
of recovery. The skull was fractured. Ahead lay a long illness at
best--after that-