The forty can ride with me at interest."
"Impossible!" Matthewson cried.
"He can't make ends meet on his salary as it is, and he has a wife and two kids—"
Daylight was upon him with a mighty oath.
"Can't!
Impossible!
What in hell do you think I'm running? A home for feeble-minded?
Feeding and dressing and wiping the little noses of a lot of idiots that can't take care of themselves?
Not on your life.
I'm hustling, and now's the time that everybody that works for me has got to hustle.
I want no fair-weather birds holding down my office chairs or anything else.
This is nasty weather, damn nasty weather, and they've got to buck into it just like me.
There are ten thousand men out of work in Oakland right now, and sixty thousand more in San Francisco.
Your nephew, and everybody else on your pay-roll, can do as I say right now or quit.
Savvee?
If any of them get stuck, you go around yourself and guarantee their credit with the butchers and grocers.
And you trim down that pay-roll accordingly.
I've been carrying a few thousand folks that'll have to carry themselves for a while now, that's all."
"You say this filter's got to be replaced," he told his chief of the water-works.
"We'll see about it.
Let the people of Oakland drink mud for a change. It'll teach them to appreciate good water.
Stop work at once.
Get those men off the pay-roll.
Cancel all orders for material.
The contractors will sue?
Let 'em sue and be damned.
We'll be busted higher'n a kite or on easy street before they can get judgment."
And to Wilkinson: "Take off that owl boat.
Let the public roar and come home early to its wife.
And there's that last car that connects with the 12:45 boat at Twenty-second and Hastings.
Cut it out. I can't run it for two or three passengers.
Let them take an earlier boat home or walk.
This is no time for philanthropy.
And you might as well take off a few more cars in the rush hours.
Let the strap-hangers pay.
It's the strap-hangers that'll keep us from going under."
And to another chief, who broke down under the excessive strain of retrenchment:— "You say I can't do that and can't do this.
I'll just show you a few of the latest patterns in the can-and-can't line.
You'll be compelled to resign?
All right, if you think so I never saw the man yet that I was hard up for.
And when any man thinks I can't get along without him, I just show him the latest pattern in that line of goods and give him his walking-papers."
And so he fought and drove and bullied and even wheedled his way along.
It was fight, fight, fight, and no let-up, from the first thing in the morning till nightfall.
His private office saw throngs every day.
All men came to see him, or were ordered to come.
Now it was an optimistic opinion on the panic, a funny story, a serious business talk, or a straight take-it-or-leave-it blow from the shoulder.
And there was nobody to relieve him.
It was a case of drive, drive, drive, and he alone could do the driving.
And this went on day after day, while the whole business world rocked around him and house after house crashed to the ground.
"It's all right, old man," he told Hegan every morning; and it was the same cheerful word that he passed out all day long, except at such times when he was in the thick of fighting to have his will with persons and things.