Mordecai rose from his chair with a colossal, awful gesture. His eyes were staring. His face was like a mask. His head turned slowly right and left through half a circle with a weird, mechanical movement, as a thing turning on a pivot in a fixed plane.
“Zey haf kilt him!” he whispered. “All ov you I gall upon to vitness, zey haf kilt him. Zey could nod ruin him. Zat zey tried to do. But ... zey haf kilt him!... Ve are vonce more in ze dark ages.”
The physicians were astonished and ill at ease. They did not know what he was talking about. They did not know who he was. I was the only one who could know what he meant and for a minute I was bewildered. Then it broke upon me.
The combat reconstructed itself in my mind. I recalled those days of strain and anguish when all the forces of Wall Street were acting to destroy him and he fought alone. He withstood them. In the might of his own strength, in that moment which it had been torture almost unendurable to bide the coming of, he smote his enemies “with the fist of wickedness” and scattered them away. Yes, all that. He had won the fight. Yet there he lay. His death would leave them in possession of the field, with a victory unawares. They meant only to break his power, to unloose his hands, to overthrow him as an upstart dynast. But the blood weapon which we think is put away, which they never meant and would not have dared to use,--it had done its work in spite of them. They could not break him. They had only killed him.
Well, we had to wait. Life must wait upon death because it can. There was much to think about. Mordecai spent two hours with me making precise arrangements against any contingency. It was very important that Wall Street should know nothing about Galt’s condition. The news might cause a panic. I was to call him up at regular intervals by a direct telephone wire on which no one could listen in. If any rumor got out it should be met with blank silence.
“Zey vill vind id zoon oud no matter,” he said.
What he needed was a little time to prepare the financial structure for the imminent shock. He would inform his associates and such others as were entitled to know and together they would agree upon protective measures. Galt’s death was bound to produce a terrific convulsion. There is no line of succession in Wall Street, no hereditary prince to receive the crown. When the monarch falls the wail is, “The king is dead! There is no king!”