About three o'clock of a certain afternoon, when each extra brought a new alarm, John G. Slade came abruptly from the great library, down the sounding marble descent that was a replica of the famous rampe of the Château of Gerny, into the tapestry-hung vestibule of his palace on upper Fifth Avenue.
He stood a moment in blank meditation, while the third man held his overcoat open and ready, watching anxiously the frown on the face of the master, who stood before him, a massive six-foot-four. Already in the great marble home itself was that feeling of alarm from the outer world which had communicated itself to the servants. Suddenly Slade, returning to himself, detected the furtive scrutiny of the footman and the butler, who had so far departed from their correctly petrified attitudes as to exchange wondering glances. He frowned, pointed to his loose black felt hat and his favorite cane, and tore so rapidly through the heavily ironed doors and down the steps to the waiting automobile that the second footman stumbled twice in his haste to be before him. Two or three reporters, who had been lurking behind the great marble bastions, sprang forward as Slade, disappearing in the motor, was whirled away.
"Up river," he said briefly, and sank back in his seat.
He was in the middle forties, a man noticeable anywhere for the overmastering vitality of his carriage and the defiant poise of his head. Nature had admirably designed him for what he was intended to be--a being always at war with men and surrounding circumstances. His face was devoid of any fine indications of sensibility, of reflection, or humorous perception of life. The upper and lower maxillary bones were in such gaunt relief they seemed rather steel girders hung to support a granite will. The head was square, sunk rather than placed upon his shoulders, and the line of the head at the back was straight and full of crude power. He had, at the same time, a suggestion in the shoulders of the obstinacy of the buffalo, the most distinctive of American beasts, and in the eye-pits of the fatalism of the Indian, which as a type often seems not so much the physical tenacity of an unexplained race as it does the peculiar impress of a continent and an atmosphere surcharged with vitality.