capital will pour in. All I do is start it going. ‘Gentlemen,’
I say, ‘here’s all the natural advantages for a great metropolis.
God Almighty put them advantages here, and he put me here to see
them. Do you want to land your tea and silk from Asia and ship
it straight East? Here’s the docks for your steamers, and here’s
the railroads. Do you want factories from which you can ship
direct by land or water? Here’s the site, and here’s the modern,
up-to-date city, with the latest improvements for yourselves and
your workmen, to live in.'”
“Then there’s the water. I’ll come pretty close to owning the
watershed. Why not the waterworks too? There’s two water
companies in Oakland now, fighting like cats and dogs and both
about broke. What a metropolis needs is a good water system.
They can’t give it. They’re stick-in-the-muds. I’ll gobble them
up and deliver the right article to the city. There’s money
there, too–money everywhere. Everything works in with
everything else. Each improvement makes the value of everything
else pump up. It’s people that are behind the value. The bigger
the crowd that herds in one place, the more valuable is the real
estate. And this is the very place for a crowd to herd. Look at
it. Just look at it! You could never find a finer site for a
great city. All it needs is the herd, and I’ll stampede a couple
of hundred thousand people in here ins two years. And what’s
more it won’t be one of these wild cat land booms. It will be
legitimate. Twenty years for now there’ll be a million people on
this side the bay. Another thing is hotels. There isn’t a
decent one in the town. I’ll build a couple of up-to-date ones
that’ll make them sit up and take notice. I won’t care if they
don’t pay for years. Their effect will more than give me my
money back out of the other holdings. And, oh, yes, I’m going to
plant eucalyptus, millions of them, on these hills.”
“But how are you going to do it?” Dede asked. “You haven’t
enough money for all that you’ve planned.”
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174
“I’ve thirty million, and if I need more I can borrow on the land
and other things. Interest on mortgages won’t anywhere near eat
up the increase in land values, and I’ll be selling land right
along.”
In the weeks that followed, Daylight was a busy man. He spent
most of his time in Oakland, rarely coming to the office. He
planned to move the office to Oakland, but, as he told Dede, the
secret preliminary campaign of buying had to be put through
first. Sunday by Sunday, now from this hilltop and now from
that, they looked down upon the city and its farming suburbs, and
he pointed out to her his latest acquisitions. At first it was
patches and sections of land here and there; but as the weeks
passed it was the unowned portions that became rare, until at
last they stood as islands surrounded by Daylight’s land.
It meant quick work on a colossal scale, for Oakland and the
adjacent country was not slow to feel the tremendous buying. But
Daylight had the ready cash, and it had always been his policy to
strike quickly. Before the others could get the warning of the
boom, he quietly accomplished many things. At the same time that
his agents were purchasing corner lots and entire blocks in the
heart of the business section and the waste lands for factory
sites, Day was rushing franchises through the city council,
capturing the two exhausted water companies and the eight or nine
independent street railways, and getting his grip on the Oakland
Creek and the bay tide-lands for his dock system. The tide-lands
had been in litigation for years, and he took the bull by the
horns–buying out the private owners and at the same time leasing
from the city fathers.
By the time that Oakland was aroused by this unprecedented
activity in every direction and was questioning excitedly the
meaning of it, Daylight secretly bought the chief Republican
newspaper and the chief Democratic organ, and moved boldly into
his new offices. Of necessity, they were on a large scale,
occupying four floors of the only modern office building in the
town–the only building that wouldn’t have to be torn down later
on, as Daylight put it. There was department after department, a
score of them, and hundreds of clerks and stenographers. As he
told Dede: “I’ve got more companies than you can shake a stick
at. There’s the Alameda & Contra Costa Land Syndicate, the
Consolidated Street Railways, the Yerba Buena Ferry Company, the
United Water Company, the Piedmont Realty Company, the Fairview
and Portola Hotel Company, and half a dozen more that I’ve got to
refer to a notebook to remember. There’s the Piedmont Laundry
Farm, and Redwood Consolidated Quarries. Starting in with our
quarry, I just kept a-going till I got them all. And there’s the
ship-building company I ain’t got a name for yet. Seeing as I
had to have ferry-boats, I decided to build them myself. They’ll
be done by the time the pier is ready for them. Phew! It all
sure beats poker. And I’ve had the fun of gouging the robber
Burning Daylight
175
gangs as well. The water company bunches are squealing yet. I
sure got them where the hair was short. They were just about all
in when I came along and finished them off.”
“But why do you hate them so?” Dede asked.
“Because they’re such cowardly skunks.”
“But you play the same game they do.”
“Yes; but not in the same way.” Daylight regarded her
thoughtfully. “When I say cowardly skunks, I mean just
that,–cowardly skunks. They set up for a lot of gamblers, and
there ain’t one in a thousand of them that’s got the nerve to be
a gambler. They’re four-flushers, if you know what that means.
They’re a lot of little cottontail rabbits making believe they’re
big rip-snorting timber wolves. They set out to everlastingly
eat up some proposition but at the first sign of trouble they
turn tail and stampede for the brush. Look how it works. When
the big fellows wanted to unload Little Copper, they sent Jakey
Fallow into the New York Stock Exchange to yell out: ‘I’ll buy
all or any part of Little Copper at fifty five,’ Little Copper
being at fifty-four. And in thirty minutes them cottontails–
financiers, some folks call them–bid up Little Copper to sixty.
And an hour after that, stampeding for the brush, they were
throwing Little Copper overboard at forty-five and even forty.
“They’re catspaws for the big fellows. Almost as fast as they
rob the suckers, the big fellows come along and hold them up. Or
else the big fellows use them in order to rob each other. That’s
the way the Chattanooga Coal and Iron Company was swallowed up by
the trust in the last panic. The trust made that panic. It had
to break a couple of big banking companies and squeeze half a
dozen big fellows, too, and it did it by stampeding the
cottontails. The cottontails did the rest all right, and the
trust gathered in Chattanooga Coal and Iron. Why, any man, with
nerve and savvee, can start them cottontails jumping for the
brush. I don’t exactly hate them myself, but I haven’t any
regard for chicken-hearted four-flushers.”
CHAPTER XVII
For months Daylight was buried in work. The outlay was terrific,
and there was nothing coming in. Beyond a general rise in land
values, Oakland had not acknowledged his irruption on the
financial scene. The city was waiting for him to show what he
was going to do, and he lost no time about it. The best skilled
brains on the market were hired by him for the different branches
of the work. Initial mistakes he had no patience with, and he
was determined to start right, as when he engaged Wilkinson,
almost doubling his big salary, and brought him out from Chicago
to take charge of the street railway organization. Night and day
the road gangs toiled on the streets. And night and day the
Burning Daylight
176
pile-drivers hammered the big piles down into the mud of San
Francisco Bay. The pier was to be three miles long, and the
Berkeley hills were denuded of whole groves of mature eucalyptus
for the piling.
At the same time that his electric roads were building out
through the hills, the hay-fields were being surveyed and broken
up into city squares, with here and there, according to best
modern methods, winding boulevards and strips of park. Broad
streets, well graded, were made, with sewers and water-pipes
ready laid, and macadamized from his own quarries. Cement
sidewalks were also laid, so that all the purchaser had to do was
to select his lot and architect and start building. The quick