Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II IN A secluded corner of a certain club billiard room two middle-aged gentlemen padded around and around a table, and poked at balls. Both appeared bored by the amusement. Their skill was little, and their luck was rather less, so that a ball rarely found a pocket. Between strokes they carried on a conversation having to do with such light and frivolous topics as bond issues, guarantees thereof, sinking funds, haulage rates, and legal decisions and pending legislation affecting transportation. Or it might be more accurate to say that one endeavoured to engage the other in conversation on these esoteric matters, at which the other repeatedly shied, evincing a preference for those of more general human interest. Not that he was uninformed on these topics. Quite the reverse. He was a rotund, florid little man, with twinkling, humorous eyes, which could bore like augers on occasion, and a mouth as firm and close as a steel trap. His name was William Bates Rapp, and his specialty was corporation law. He was counsel for the Western Airline Railway,and just then he was pretending to play billiards with its president, Cromwell York. York, who also was pretending to play billiards with Rapp, was a dogged gentleman who was accustomed to take his pound of flesh whenever he could not obtain, on some pretext, two pounds, His subordinates said that he worked twenty-five hours a day, which gives, if you consider it, an advantage of some fifteen days per annum. He was in the grip of his business, body and soul. It fascinated him, dominated him more and more as the years went on, as his own fortune and his interests increased. He was continually reaching out for more territory, and in so doing he came in hostile contact with other railway men, also gunning for the same game. Occ... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.