Part 27

At that De Malquit struck his hands together, a resounding smack, and then went out, turning upon Osterman a last despairing glance. That same night De Malquit killed himself, a thing which Osterman had assumed he would not do—or so he said, and I resigned. The man had really been in earnest. And, to make matters worse, only three months later De Malquit’s wife killed herself, taking poison in the small apartment to which she had been forced to remove once the breadwinner of the family was gone. According to the pictures and descriptions published in the newspapers at the time she was, as De Malquit had said, an invalid, practically bedridden. Also, according to the newspapers, De Malquit had in more successful days been charitably inclined, having contributed liberally to the support of an orphan asylum, the Gratiot Home for Orphans, the exterior appearance of which Osterman was familiar with. This fact was published in all of the papers and was said to have impressed Osterman, who was said always to have had a friendly leaning toward orphans. I have since heard that only his very sudden death three years ago prevented his signing a will which contained a proviso leaving the bulk of his great fortune to a holding company instructed to look after orphans. Whether this is truth or romance I do not know.

2. The case of Henry Greasadick, another of Mr. Osterman’s competitors, was similar. Mr. Greasadick has been described to me as a very coarse and rough man, without any education of any kind, but one who understood oil prospecting and refining, and who was finally, though rather unfortunately for himself, the cause of the development by Osterman of the immensely valuable Arroya Verde field. It is not likely that Greasadick would ever have made the fortune from this field that Osterman and his confrères were destined to reap. However, it is equally true that he was most shabbily treated in the matter, far more so than was De Malquit in regard to his very questionable holdings and sales. The details of the Arroya Verde field and Greasadick are as follows: Greasadick has been described to me as a big, blustery, dusty soul, uncouth in manners and speech, but one who was a sound and able prospector. And Osterman, it appears, having laid the foundation of his fortune by treating De Malquit and others as he had, had come west, first to the lumber properties of Washington and Oregon, where he bought immense tracts; and later, to the oil lands of California and Mexico, in which state and country he acquired very important and eventually (under him) productive holdings. Now it chanced that in his wanderings through southern California and Arizona he came across Greasadick, who had recently chanced upon a virgin oil field which, although having very little capital himself, he was secretly attempting to develop. In fact, Greasadick had no money when he discovered this oil field and was borrowing from L. T. Drewberry, of the K. B. & B., and one or two others on the strength of his prospects. It also appears that Drewberry it was who first called the attention of Osterman to Greasadick and his find and later plotted with him to oust Greasadick. Osterman was at that time one of three or four men who were interested in developing the K. B. & B. into a paying property by extending it into Arizona.

At any rate, Greasadick’s holdings were one hundred miles from any main line road, and there was very little water, only a thin trickle that came down through a cut. True, the K. B. & B. was about to build a spur to Larston in order to aid him, but Larston, once the line was built to it, was fourteen miles away and left Greasadick with the problem of piping or hauling his oil to that point. Once he heard of it Osterman saw at a glance that by a little deft manœuvring it could be made very difficult for Greasadick to do anything with his property except sell, and this manœuvring he proceeded to do. By buying the land above Greasadick’s, which was a mountain slope, and then because of a thin wall of clay and shale dividing the Arroya Verde, in which lay Greasadick’s land, from the Arroya Blanco, which was unwatered and worthless, being able to knock the same through, he was able to divert the little water upon which Greasadick then depended to do his work. Only it was all disguised as a landslide—an act of God—and a very expensive one for Greasadick to remedy. As for the proposed spur to Larston—well, that was easy to delay indefinitely. There was Drewberry, principal stockholder of the K. B. & B., who joined with Osterman in this adroit scheme. Finally, there was the simple device of buying in the mortgage given by Greasadick to Drewberry and others and waiting until such time as he was hard-pressed to force him to sell out. This was done through Whitley, Osterman’s efficient assistant, who in turn employed another to act for him. Throughout, Osterman saw to it that he personally did not appear.

Of course Greasadick, when he discovered what the plot was, roared and charged like a bull. Indeed before he was eventually defeated he became very threatening and dangerous, attempting once even to kill Drewberry. Yet he was finally vanquished and his holdings swept away. With no money to make a new start and seeing others prosper where he had failed for want of a little capital, he fell into a heavy gloom and finally died there in Larston in the bar that had been erected after the K. B. & B. spur had been completed. Through all of this Mr. Osterman appears to have been utterly indifferent to the fate of the man he was undermining. He cared so little what became of him afterwards that he actually admitted, or remarked to Whitley, who remained one of his slaves to the end, that one could scarcely hope to build a large fortune without indulging in a few such tricks.

3. Lastly, there was the matter of the C. C. and Q. L. Railroad, the major portion of the stock of which he and Frank O. Parm, of the Parm-Baggott chain of stores, had managed to get hold of by the simple process of buying a few shares and then bringing stockholders’ suits under one and another name in order to embarrass President Doremus and his directors, and frighten investors so they would let go of the stock. And this stock, of course, was picked up by Osterman and Parm, until at last these two became the real power behind the road and caused it to be thrown into the hands of a receiver and then sold to themselves. That was two years before ever Michael Doremus, the first president of the road, resigned. When he did he issued a statement saying that he was being hounded by malign financial influences and that the road was as sound as ever it had been, which was true. Only it could not fight all of these suits and the persistent rumors of mismanagement that were afoot. As a matter of fact, Mr. Doremus died only a year after resigning, declaring at that time that a just God ruled and that time would justify himself. But Mr. Osterman and Mr. Parm secured the road, and finally incorporated it with the P. B. & C. as is well known.

III

Some data taken from the biographic study of the late J. H. Osterman, multimillionaire and oil king, prepared for Lingley’s Magazine and by it published in its issue for October, 1917.

In order to understand the late J. H. Osterman and his great success and his peculiar faults one would first have to have known and appreciated the hard and colorless life that had surrounded him as a boy. His father, in so far as I have been able to ascertain, was a crude, hard, narrow man who had been made harder and, if anything, cruder by the many things which he had been compelled to endure. He was not a kind or soft-spoken man to his children. He died when John Osterman, the central figure of this picture, was eleven. Osterman’s mother, so it is said, was a thin and narrow and conventional woman, as much harried and put upon by her husband as ever he was by life. Also there was one sister, unattractive and rough-featured, an honest and narrow girl who, like her mother, worked hard up to nineteen, when her mother died. After that, both parents being dead, she and her brother attempted to manage the farm, and did so fairly successfully for two years when the sister decided to marry; and Osterman consenting, she took over the farm. This falling in with his mood and plans, he ceased farming for good and betook himself to the Texas oil fields, where he appears to have mastered some of the details of oil prospecting and refining.

But before that, what miseries had he not endured! He was wont to recount how, when grasshoppers and drought took all of their crops for two years after his father’s death, he and his mother and sister were reduced to want and he had actually been sent to beg a little cornmeal and salt from the local store on the promise to pay, possibly a year later. Taxes mounted up. There was no money to buy seed or to plant or replace stock, which had had to be sold. The family was without shoes or clothes. Osterman himself appeared to be of the fixed opinion that the citizens and dealers of Reamer, from near which point in Kansas he hailed, were a hard and grasping crew. He was fond of telling how swift they were to point out that there was no help for either himself or his mother or sister as farmers and to deny them aid and encouragement on that score. He once said that all he ever heard in the local branch of his mother’s church, of which he was never a confessing communicant, was “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”; also “with whatsoever measure ye mete it shall be measured to you again.” Obviously such maxims taken very much to heart by a boy of his acquisitive and determined nature might bring about some of the shrewd financial tricks later accredited to him. Yet he appears to have been a man of some consideration and sympathy where boys were concerned, for it was said that he made it a rule in all his adventures to select the poorest if most determined youths of his organization for promotion and to have developed all of his chief lieutenants from the ranks of farm or orphan boy beginners whom he encouraged to work for him. How true this is the writer is not able to state. However, of the forty or more eminent men who have been connected with him in his enterprises, all but four were farm or orphan boys who had entered his enterprises as clerks or menials at the very bottom, and some seven of the total were from his native State, Kansas.

IV

The private cogitations of the late John H. Osterman in his mansion at 1046 Fifth Avenue, New York, and elsewhere during the last five years of his life.

* * * * *

Oh, but those days when he had been working and scheming to get up in the world and was thinking that money was the great thing—the only thing! Those impossible wooden towns in the Northwest and elsewhere in which he had lived and worked, and those worse hotels and boarding-houses—always hunting, hunting for money or the key to it. The greasy, stinking craft in which he had made his way up weedy and muddy rivers in Honduras and elsewhere—looking for what? Snakes, mosquitoes, alligators, tarantulas, horned toads and lizards. In Honduras he had slept under chiqua trees on mats of chiqua leaves, with only a fire to keep away snakes and other things. And of a morning he had chased away noisy monkeys and parroquets from nearby branches with rotten fruit so as to sleep a little longer. Alone, he had tramped through fever swamps, pursued by Pequi Indians, who wanted only the contents of his wretched pack. And he had stared at huge coyal palms, a hundred feet high, with the great feathery leaves fifteen feet long and their golden flowers three feet high. Ah, well, that was over now. He had shot the quetzal with its yellow tail feathers three feet long and had traded them for food. Once he had all but died of fever in a halfbreed’s hut back of Cayo. And the halfbreed had then stolen his gun and razor and other goods and left him to make his way onward as best he might. That was life for you, just like that. People were like that.

And it was during that time that he had come to realize that by no honest way at his age was he likely to come to anything financially. Roaming about the drowsy, sun-baked realm, he had encountered Messner, an American and a fugitive, he guessed, and it was Messner who had outlined to him the very scheme by which he had been able, later, to amass his first quick fortune in New York. It was Messner who had told him of Torbey and how he had come up to London from Central Africa to offer shares in a bogus rubber enterprise based on immense forests which he was supposed to have found in the wilds of Africa yet which did not exist. And it was the immense though inaccessible rubber forests in Honduras that had inspired him to try the same thing in New York. Why not? A new sucker was born every minute, and he had all to gain and nothing to lose. Messner said that Torbey had advertised for a widow with some money to push his enterprise, whereupon he had proceeded to tell the London speculative public of his treasure and to sell two pound shares for as low as ten shillings in order to show tremendous rises in value—to issue two million pounds’ worth of absolutely worthless stock.

By these methods and by having the stock listed on the London curb he was able to induce certain curb or “dog” brokers to go short of this stock without having any of it in their possession. Finally they began to sell so freely and to pay so little attention to the amount that was being sold that it was easy for Torbey to employ agents to buy from all of them freely on margin. And then, as the law of the curb and the state permitted, he had demanded (through them, of course) the actual delivery of the shares, the full curb value of the stock being offered. Of course the brokers had none, although they had sold thousands; nor had any one else except Torbey, who had seen to it that all outstanding stock had been recalled to his safe. That meant that they must come to Torbey to buy or face a jail sentence, and accordingly they had flocked to his office, only to be properly mulcted for the total face value of the shares when they came.

Well, he had done that same thing in New York. Following the example of the good Torbey, he had picked up a few unimportant options in Honduras, far from any railroad, and had come to New York to launch Calamita. Just as Torbey had done, he had looked for a rich widow, a piano manufacturer’s wife in this case, and had persuaded her that there were millions in it. From her he had gone on to Wall Street and the curb and had done almost exactly as Torbey had done.... Only that fellow De Malquit had killed himself, and that was not so pleasant. He hadn’t anticipated that anything like that would happen! That unfortunate wife of his. And those two children made orphans. That was the darkest spot. He hadn’t known, of course, that De Malquit himself was helping orphans—or—And from there he had gone on to the forests of Washington and Oregon, where he had bought immense tracts on which even yet he was realizing, more and more. And from there it had been an easy step to oil in southern California and Mexico—Ah, Greasadick, another sad case!—And from there to mines and government concessions in Peru and Ecuador, and the still greater ones in Argentina and Chile. Money came fast to those who had it. At last, having accumulated a fortune of at least nine millions, he had been able to interest Nadia, and through her the clever and well-to-do fashionable set who had backed his projects with their free capital. And by now his fortune had swollen to almost forty millions.

But what of it? Could he say he was really content? What was he getting out of it? Life was so deceptive; it used and then tossed one aside. At first it had seemed wonderful to be able to go, do, act, buy and sell as he chose, without considering anything save whether the thing he was doing was agreeable and profitable. He had thought that pleasure would never pall, but it had. There was this thing about age, that it stole over one so unrelentingly, fattening one up or thinning one down, hardening the arteries and weakening the muscles and blood, until it was all but useless to go on. And what was the import of his success, anyhow, especially to one who had no children and no friends worthy of the name? There was no such thing as true friendship in nature. It was each man for himself, everywhere, and the devil take the hindmost. It was life that used and tossed one aside, however great or powerful one might be. There was no staying life or the drift of time.

Of course there had been the pleasure of building two great houses for Nadia and living in them when he was not living in other parts of the world. But all that had come too late; he had been too old to enjoy them when they did come. She had been a great catch no doubt, but much too attractive to be really interested in him at his age. His wealth had been the point with her—any one could see that; he knew it at the time and would not now try to deceive himself as to that. At the time he had married her she had had social position whereas he had none. And after she married him all her social influence, to be sure, had been used to advance his cause. Still, that scheme of hers to get him to leave his great fortune to those two worthless sons of hers. Never! They were not worthy of it. Those dancing, loafing wasters! He would see to it that his fortune was put to some better use than that. He would leave it to orphans rather than to them, for after all orphans in his employ had proved more valuable to him than even they had, hadn’t they?—That curious fellow, De Malquit!—So long ago. Besides wasn’t it Nadia’s two sons who had influenced their mother to interest herself in D’Eyraud, the architect who had built their two houses and had started Nadia off on that gallery idea. And not a picture in it that would interest a sensible person. And wasn’t it because of her that he had never troubled to answer the letters of his sister Elvira asking him to educate her two boys for her. He had fancied at the time that taking her two children into his life would in some way affect his social relations with Nadia and her set. And now Elvira was dead and he did not know where the children were. He could charge that to her if he wanted to, couldn’t he?

Well, life was like that. When he had built his two great houses he had thought they would prove an immense satisfaction to him, as they had for a time; but he would not be here much longer now to enjoy them. He wasn’t nearly as active as he had been, and the sight of the large companies of people that came to pose and say silly things to each other was very wearying. They were always civil to him, of course, but little more. They wanted the influence of his name. And as long as he permitted it, his homes would be haunted by those who wished to sell him things—stocks, bonds, enterprises, tapestries, estates, horses. And those two boys of hers, along with Nadia herself where her so-called art objects were concerned, so busy encouraging them! Well, he was done with all that now. He would not be bothered. Even youth and beauty of a venal character had appeared on the scene and had attempted to set traps for him. But his day was over. All these fripperies and pleasures were for people younger than he. It required youth and energy to see beauty and romance in such things, and he hadn’t a trace of either left. His day was over and he might as well die, really, for all the good he was, apart from his money, to any one.

V

The reminiscences of Byington Briggs, Esq., of Skeff, Briggs & Waterhouse, private legal advisers to the late J. H. Osterman, as developed in a private conversation at the Metropolitan Club in New York in December, 19—.

“You knew old Osterman, didn’t you? I was his confidential adviser for the last eight years of his life, and a shrewder old hawk never sailed the air. He was a curious combination of speculator, financier and dreamer, with a high percentage of sharper thrown in for good measure. You’d never imagine that he was charitably inclined, now would you? It never occurred to me until about a year and a half before his death. I have never been able to explain it except that as a boy he had had a very hard time and in his old age resented seeing his two stepsons, Kester and Rand Benda, getting ready to make free use of his fortune once he was gone. And then I think he had come to believe that his wife was merely using him to feather her own nest. I wouldn’t want it mentioned to a soul as coming from me, but three months before he died he had me draw up a will leaving his entire estate of something like forty millions, not to her, as the earlier will filed by her showed, but to the J. H. Osterman Foundation, a corporation whose sole purpose was to administer his fortune for the benefit of something like three hundred thousand orphans incarcerated in institutions in America. And but for the accident of his sudden death out there at Shell Cove two years ago, he would have left it that way.

“According to the terms of the will that I drew up, Mrs. Osterman and her two sons were to receive only the interest on certain bonds that were to be placed in trust for them for their lifetime only; after that the money was to revert to the fund. That would have netted them between forty and fifty thousand a year among them—nothing more. In the will I drew up he left $500,000 outright to that Gratiot Home for Orphans up here at 68th Street, and he intended his big country place at Shell Cove as the central unit in a chain of modern local asylums for orphans that was to have belted America. The income from the property managed by the foundation was to have been devoted to this work exclusively, and the Gratiot institution was to have been the New York branch of the system. His wife has leased the Shell Cove place to the Gerbermanns this year, I see, and a wonderful place it is too, solid marble throughout, a lake a mile long, a big sunken garden, a wonderful glassed-in conservatory, and as fine a view of the sea as you’ll find anywhere. Yet she never knew until the very last hour of his life—the very last, for I was there—that he planned to cut her off with only forty or fifty thousand a year. If we weren’t all such close friends I wouldn’t think of mentioning it even now, although I understand that Klippert, who was his agent in the orphan project, has been telling the story. It was this way: