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Updated: May 13, 2025
It was as the result of one of these moves that the great Manasquale mines were so hemmed in by ruinous freight rates, by strike troubles, by floods from broken machinery and mysteriously leaky dams, that I was able to buy them "at a fair price" that is, at less than one-fifth their value.
I invited the angry frown of the Roebuck God by saying: "And I bought in the Manasquale mines on my own account." "On your own account!" said Roebuck. Then he hastily effaced his involuntary air of the engineer startled by sight of an unexpected red light. "Yes," replied I, as calm as if I were not realizing the tremendous significance of what I had announced.
So he replied: "Oh, no. Simply that everything's uncertain nowadays." My mind had been all this time on those Manasquale mining properties. I now said: "Has Roebuck told you that I had to buy those mines on my own account?" "Yes," he said. He hesitated, and again he gave me a look whose meaning came to me only when it was too late. "I think, Blacklock, you'd better turn them over to me."
"For four years now," I went on, "you people have been promising to take me in as a principal in some one of your deals to give me recognition by making me president, or chairman of an executive or finance committee. I am an impatient man, Mr. Roebuck. Life is short, and I have much to do. So I have bought the Manasquale mines and I shall hold them."
"Why didn't you go to Roebuck?" he asked without looking up. "Because it is he that has stuck the knife into me." "Why?" "I don't know. I suspect the Manasquale properties, which I brought into the combine, have some value, which no one but Roebuck, and perhaps Langdon, knows about and that I in some way was dangerous to them through that fact. They haven't given me time to look into it."
But for my self-hypnotism in the case of Roebuck, I find no excuse whatever for myself. He sent for me and told me what share in National Coal they had decided to give me for my Manasquale mines. "Langdon and Melville," said he, "think me too liberal; far too liberal, my boy. But I insisted in your case I felt we could afford to be generous as well as just."
"It must have something to do with the Manasquale mines," I decided. "I thought I had given over my control of them, but somehow I must still have a control that makes me too powerful for Roebuck to be at ease so long as I am afoot and armed." And I resolved to take my lawyers and search the whole Manasquale transaction to explore it from attic to underneath the cellar flooring.
My lawyers had sold me out; I, fool that I was, had not guarded the only weak plate in my armor against my companions the plate over my back, to shed assassin thrusts. Roebuck and Langdon between them owned the governor; he owned the Canal Commission; my canal, which gave me access to tide-water for the product of my Manasquale mines, was as good as closed.
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