“Hurry!” commanded Gail. “Curiosity is bad for me.”
Allison laughed heartily at her impatience. He had meant to arouse her interest, and he had done so. She would not have confessed it, but she was fascinated by the thing he had held in reserve. It was like the cruelty of telling a child of a toy in a trunk which is still at the station.
“I conquered it,” he told her, with an assumption of nonchalance which did not deceive her. There was too much of under-vibration in his tone, and the eyes which he turned upon her were glowing in spite of his smile. “In my hand I hold control of the transportation of the world! If a pound of freight is started westward or eastward from New York, addressed to me at its starting point, it will circle the globe, and on every mile of its passage it will pay tribute to me. If a man starts to travel north or south or east or west, anywhere on the five continents or the seven seas, he must pay tribute to me. With that shipment of every necessity and luxury under my control, I control the necessities and luxuries themselves; so there is no human being in the world who can escape contributing tithes to the monster company I have consolidated.”
He was disappointed, for a moment. She seemed almost unimpressed. In reality, she was struggling to comprehend what he had just said to her. It was so incredibly huge in its proportions, so gigantic, so extravagantly far reaching that she had only words in her ears. He must be speaking in hyperbole.
“It is difficult to grasp,” he admitted. “When I first conceived of it, in answer to your why, I could not myself comprehend any more than that I had thought of an absurdity, like the lover who wished that the sea were ink and the land a pen that he might seize it, and write across the sky ‘I love you!’ It was as fantastic as that in my mind, at first, and in order to reduce the idea to actual thought, I had to break it into fragments; and that is the way I set about my campaign.”
Gail was listening eagerly now. She was beginning to dimly comprehend that Allison had actually wrought a miracle of commerce, probably the most stupendous in this entire century of commercial miracles; and her admiration of him grew. She had always admired great force, great strength, great power, and here, unfolding before her, was the evidence of it at its zenith.