companies from shore; he stood at the ticker and
took his money off the tape. Whenever he won a dollar he had risked a
dollar.

In person Mr. Bayard was slim, elegant, thoroughbred, with blood as red
and pure of strain as the blood of a racing horse. To see him was to
realize the silk and steel whereof he was compounded. There was a vanity
about him, too; but it was a regal vanity, as though a king were vain.
His brow was full and grave, his face dignified, his eye thoughtful, and
he knew men in the dark by feel of bark, as woodmen know a tree. He
stepped about with a high carriage of the head, as might one who has
prides well founded. His health was even, his nerves were true; he owned
a military courage that remained cool with victory, steady with defeat.
It was these which rendered Mr. Bayard the Bourse-force men accounted
him, and compelled consideration even from folk most powerful whenever
they would float an enterprise or foray a field of stocks. Did Oil or
Sugar or Steel come into the Street with purpose of revenge or profit,
its first care was a peace-treaty with Mr. Bayard. That was not because
Oil or Steel or Sugar loved, but because it feared him. The King might
not hunt in Sherwood without permission of Robin Hood, nor Montrose walk
in Glenfruin wanting the MacGregor's consent.

In his youth--that is to say, almost a third of a century away--Mr.
Bayard had been of open, frank, and generous impulse. He believed in
humanity and relied upon his friends. Mr. Bayard at sixty was changed
from that pose of thirty years before. He was cold and distant and
serene in a cloud-capped way of ice. He trusted no one but himself, took
no man's word save his own, was self-reliant to the point of bitterness,
and rife of proud suspicions. Also, he had carried concealment to the
plane of Art, and those who knew him best were most in the dark
concerning him. And yet Mr. Bayard made a specialty of verbal truth, and
his word was a word of gold.

It was not that Mr. Bayard deceived men, he allowed them to deceive
themselves. They watched and they listened; and in the last they
learned, commonly at the cost of a gaping wound in their bank balances,
that what they thought they saw they did not see, and what they were
sure they heard they did not hear; that from the beginning they had been
the victims of self-constructed delusions, and were cast away by errors
all their own. Once burned, twice wise; and the paradox crept upon Wall