is own nest.
All his webs and filaments and wires and pipes and cables went out and
brought back things for him to dispose of. He was the center of the
universe for himself and for Harvey. He was the beginning and the end.
His bank was the first and the last word in business and in politics in
that great valley. What he spun was his; what he drew into the web was
his. When he invited the fly into his parlor, it was for the delectation
of the spider, not to be passed on to some other larger web and fatter
spider. But that day as he sat, a withered, yellow-skinned, red-eyed,
rattle-toothed, old man with a palsied head that never stopped wagging,
as he sat under his skull cap, blinking out at a fat, little world that
always had been his prey, Daniel Sands felt that he had ceased to be an
end, and had become a means.

His bank, his mines, his smelters, even his municipal utilities, all
were slipping from under his control. He could feel the pull of the rope
from the outside around his own foot. He could feel that he was not a
generator of power. He was merely a pumping station, gathering up all
the fat of the little land that once was his, and passing it out in
pipes that ran he knew not where, to go to some one else--he knew not
whom. True, his commissions came back, and his dividends came back, and
they were rich and sweet, and worth while. But--he was shocked when he
found courage to ask it--if they did not come back, what could he do?
He was part of a great web--a little filament in one obscure corner, and
he was spinning a fabric whose faintest plan he could not conceive.

This angered him, and the spider spat in vain rage. The power he loved
was gone; he was the mere shell of a spider; he was dead. Some man might
come into the bank to-morrow and take even the semblance of his power
from him. They might, indeed, shut up every mill, close every mine, lock
every factory, douse the fire in every smelter in the Wahoo Valley, and
the man who believed he had opened the mills, dug the mines, builded the
factories and lighted the smelter fires with all but his own hands,
could only rage and fume, or be polite and pretend it was his desire.

The town that he believed that he had made out of sunshine and prairie
grass, for all he could do, might be condemned as a bat roost, and the
wires and cables, that ran from his desk all over the Wahoo Valley,
might grow rusty and jangle in the prairie winds, while the pipes rotted
under