Page:The Wizard of Wall Street and his Wealth.djvu/348

 and the nation in dishonor. We see him now driven out of Erie by the indignant stockholders, headed by Gen. Sickles, Gen. Dix and Gen. McClellan. We see him arrested for appropriating the property of the company of which he was president, and to save himself we see him make a pretended restitution of the misappropriated millions. We see him cornering Northwest and raking in the wealth of his recent Wall street partner. We can see him now fastening his fingers on the great Union Pacific railroad, which for ten years he controlled. We can see him betraying his trust as trustee for Kansas Pacific mortgages, for which he was obliged years after to plead the statute of limitations in order to save himself from prosecution. We see him securing control of the Pacific Mail, the chief American steamship line. We see him buying for a few million dollars from Commodore Garrison the Missouri Pacific, 'just as a plaything,' but which he afterward developed into a great railroad system covering thousands of miles of territory. We see him repeating his old Erie tactics in Wabash and we can hear the stinging words of an unpurchasable judge as he turns his dummy receivers from power. We see him organizing an opposition against Western Union until, the favorable moment arriving, he secures control of the company and by a series of extraordinary consolidations make himself the head of a telegraph monopoly with a system covering the United States and crossing the Atlantic Ocean. We hear the crash of another panic. There are moments when we think