The influence of these four was vast and far-reaching, and they were scheming to make their grip on the republic's resources even more secure and relentless. If their plans carried, no man could eat, or clothe himself, or warm his body and drive his manufacturing engines, or travel from place to place and ship the product of his mills without paying tribute to Gilhooly, Popham, Meigs, and Markham. Should those schemes, titanic in conception, be worked out to their manifest conclusion, four men would hold the destiny of industrial America in the hollow of their hands. Prosperity would wait upon their pleasure, or at a mere nod would be paralyzed and leave the country stranded on the reefs of disaster.
It seemed an odd fatality that, at the very time these commanders-in-chief of industry were plotting to make their power complete, they should have vanished as utterly as though they had been engulfed by a tidal wave and swept into the broad regions of the Atlantic. A few facts were brought to light through the probing of skilled detective minds, but these facts were in nowise clues to the fate that had overtaken the millionaires.
Popham's confidential aide reluctantly admitted that his chief had accepted an invitation from Quinn, and had gone to his "castle" for an interview. Quinn professed to have made some discovery or other which, he declared, would make coal a useless commodity so far as human needs were concerned. Popham, while laughing at Quinn's pretensions, was nevertheless secretly worried. Anything that threatened the success of the coup which was being engineered by himself and his three confreres was to be dealt with decisively and without loss of time.
In the case of Meigs, Markham, and Gilhooly there was no confidential aide to offer testimony, for these bright, particular stars of high finance had placed a limit on the confidence reposed in their secretaries. Nevertheless, the probing minds at work on the case developed the extraordinary fact that these men, no less than Popham, had visited Quinn at the latter's request. A spirit of scoffing investigation animated them, but they were prepared to see with their own eyes and hear with their own ears whatever Quinn had to show and to say. If anything that militated against their projected _coup_ was brought before them, they would proceed to lay the spectre forthwith.