Then business. A different sort of cruelty entered there. He had a method of advancement which was far more effective than adroitness. With the same vicious fever of achievement which had marked the conquering of his books, he had made himself flawlessly efficient, and had contrasted himself deliberately with whatever weakness he could find in his superiors. On the day when the superintendent drank, Allison took especial pains to create an emergency, a break-down in the power plant, and showed himself side by side with the temporarily stupid superintendent, clear-eyed, firm-jawed, glowing cheeked, ready to grapple with his own emergency. He became superintendent. Trickery, now. A block of stock here, a block of stock there, a combination of small holdings by which an unsuspected group of outsiders swept in with control of that first little street car company. Allison’s was the smallest block of shares in that combination, infinitesimal as compared with the total capitalisation of the company, the investment of his small savings combined with all the borrowing he could manage. Yet, since he had organised the rebellion, he was left in its control by the same personal dominance with which he had brought together the warring elements. Less than two years after his accession to management, he had frozen out the associates who had put him in power. They none of them knew how it was done, but they did know that he had taken advantage of every tricky opportunity his position gave him, and they were bitter about it. He laughed at them, and he thrashed the man who complained loudest, a man who had lost every cent of his money through Allison’s manipulations. Well, that was the way of business. The old rule of conquest that might makes right had only gone out of favour as applied to physical oppression. In everything else, it still prevailed; and Allison was its chief exponent.
The years of manhood. The panorama was a swiftly moving one now. Combinations and consolidations had followed closely one upon the other; brilliant and bewildering shiftings of the pieces on the chess board of his particular business. Other players had become confused in all these kaleidoscopic changes, some of which had seemed meaningless; but not Allison. Every shift left him in a position of more ruthless advantage, even in those moves which were intended only to create confusion; and he pushed steadily forward towards the one mark he had set; that there should eventually be none other in the field than himself! It was because he never flagged that he could do this. At no summit had he ever paused for gratification over the extent of his climb, for a backward glance over his fiercely contended pathway, for refreshment, for breath; but, with that exhaustless physical vitality inherited from his father and mental vitality inherited from his mother, he had kept his pace forward, plunging onward, from summit to still higher summit, and never asking that there might be one highest peak to which he could attain, and rest! True, sometimes he had thought, on the upward way, that at the summit he might pause, but had that summit been the highest, with none other luring him in the distant sky, he would have been disappointed.