“I saw there something missing from her great blue eyes. I looked; gasped”

Friday, the Thirteenth

Chapter I.

“Friday, the 13th; I thought as much. If Bob has started, there will behell, but I will see what I can do.”

The sound of my voice, as I dropped the receiver, seemed to part the mistsof five years and usher me into the world of Then as though it had neverpassed on.

I had been sitting in my office, letting the tape slide through my fingerswhile its every yard spelled “panic” in a constantly rising voice, whenthey told me that Brownley on the floor of the Exchange wanted me at the’phone, and “quick.” Brownley was our junior partner and floor man. Hetalked with a rush. Stock Exchange floor men in panics never let theirspeech hobble.

“Mr. Randolph, it’s sizzling over here, and it’s getting hotter everysecond. It’s Bob—that is evident to all. If he keeps up this pace fortwenty minutes longer, the sulphur will overflow ‘the Street’ and getinto the banks and into the country, and no man can tell how muchterritory will be burned over by to-morrow. The boys have begged me to askyou to throw yourself into the breach and stay him. They agree you are theonly hope now.”

“Are you sure, Fred, that this is Bob’s work?” I asked. “Have you seenhim?”

“Yes, I have just come from his office, and glad I was to get out. He’s onthe war-path, Mr. Randolph—uglier than I ever saw him. The last time hebroke loose was child’s play to his mood to-day. Mother sent me word thismorning that she saw last night the spell was coming. He had been up tosee her and sisters, and mother thought from his tone he was about todisappear again. When she told me of his mood, and I remembered the day, Iwas afraid he might seek his vent here. Also I heard of his being abouttown till long after midnight. The minute I opened his office door thismorning he flew at me like a panther. I told him I had only dropped in onmy rounds for an order, as they were running off right smart, and I didn’tknow but he might like to pick up some bargains. ‘Bargains!’ he roared,‘don’t you know the day? Don’t you know it is Friday, the 13th? Go backto that hell-pit and sell, sell, sell.’ ‘Sell what and how much?’ I asked.‘Anything, everything. Give the thieves every share they will take, andwhen they won’t take any more, ram as much again down their crops untilthey spit up all they have been buying for the last three months!’ Goingout I met Jim Holliday and Frank Swan rushing in. They are evidentlyexecuting Bob’s orders, and have been pouring Anti-People’s out for anhour. They will be on the floor again in a few minutes, so I thought itsafer to call you before I started to sell. Mr. Randolph, they cannot takemuch more of anything in here, and if I begin to throw stocks over, itwill bring the gavel inside of ten minutes; and that will be to announce adozen failures. It’s yet twenty minutes to one and God only knows whatwill happen before three. It’s up to you, Mr. Randolph, to do something,and unless I am on a bad slant, you haven’t many minutes to lose.”

It was then I dropped the receiver with “I thought as much!” As I had beenfingering the tape, watching five and ten millions crumbling from pricevalues every few minutes, I was sure this was the work of Bob Brownley.No one else in Wall Street had the power, the nerve, and the devilishcruelty to rip things as they had been ripped during the last twentyminutes. The night before I had passed Bob in the theatre lobby. I gavehim close scrutiny and saw the look of which I of all men best knew themeaning. The big brown eyes were set on space; the outer corners of thehandsome mouth were drawn hard and tense as though weighted. As I had mywife with me it was impossible to follow him, but when I got home I calledup his house and his clubs, intending to ask, him to run up and smoke acigar with me, but could locate him nowhere. I tried again in the morningwithout success, but when just before noon the tape began to jump andflash and snarl, I remembered Bob’s ugly mood, and all it portended.

Fred Brownley was Bob’s youngest brother, twelve years his junior. He hadbeen with Randolph & Randolph from the day he left college, and for over ayear had been our most trusted Stock Exchange man. Bob Brownley, whenhimself, was as fond of his “baby brother,” as he called him, as hisbeautiful Southern mother was of both; but when the devil had possessionof Bob—and his option during the past five years had been exercised manya time—mother and brother had to take their place with all the rest ofthe world, for then Bob knew no kindred, no friends. All the wide worldwas to him during those periods a jungle peopled with savage animals andreptiles to hunt and fight and tear and kill.

It is hardly necessary for me to explain who Randolph & Randolph are. Formore than sixty years the name has spoken for itself in every part of theworld where dollar-making machines are installed. No railroad is financed,no great “industrial” projected, without by force of habit, hat-in-handinga by-your-leave of Randolph & Randolph, and every nation when entering themarket for loans, knows that the favour of the foremost American bankersis something which must be reckoned with. I pride myself that atforty-two, at the end of the ten years I have had the helm of Randolph &Randolph, I have done nothing to mar the great name my father and unclecreated, but something to add to its sterling reputation for honestdealing, fearless, old-fashioned methods, and all-round integrity.Bradstreet’s and other mercantile agencies say, in reporting Randolph &Randolph, “Worth fifty millions and upward, credit unlimited.” I can takebut small praise for this, for the report was about the same the day Ileft college and came to the office to “learn the business.” But, as thesurvivor of my great father and uncle, I can say, my Maker as my witness,that Randolph & Randolph have never loaned a dollar of their millions atover legal rates, 6 per cent, per annum; have never added to their hoardby any but fair, square business methods; and that blight of blights,frenzied finance, has yet to find a lodging-place beneath the oldblack-and-gold sign that father and uncle nailed up with their own handsover the entrance.

Nineteen years ago I was graduated from Harvard. My classmate and chum,Bob Brownley, of Richmond, Va., was graduated with me. He was class poet,I, yard marshal. We had been four years together at St. Paul’s previous toentering Harvard. No girl and lover were fonder than we of each other.

My people had money, and to spare, and with it a hard-headed, Northernhorse-sense. The Brownleys were poor as church mice, but they had thebrilliant, virile blood of the old Southern oligarchy and the romantic,“salaam-to-no-one” Dixie-land pride of before-the-war days, when Southernprodigality and hospitality were found wherever women were fair and men’smirrors in the bottom of their julep-glasses.

Bob’s father, one of the big, white pillars of Southern aristocracy, hadgone through Congress and the Senate of his country to the tune of “Spendand not spare,” which left his widow and three younger daughters and asmall son dependent upon Bob, his eldest.

Many a warm summer’s afternoon, as Bob and I paddled down the Charles, andoften on a cold, crispy night as we sat in my shooting-box on the Cape Codshore, had we matched up for our future. I was to have the inside run ofthe great banking business of Randolph & Randolph, and Bob was eventuallyto represent my father’s firm on the floor of the Stock Exchange. “I’d diein an office,” Bob used to say, “and the floor of the Stock Exchange isjust the chimney-place to roast my hoe-cake in.” So when our college dayswere over my able had saddled Bob’s youth with the heavy responsibilitiesof husbanding and directing his family’s slim finances that he took tobusiness as a swallow to the air. We entered the office of Randolph &Randolph on the same day, and on its anniversary, a year later, my fathersummoned us into his office for a sort of tally-up talk. Neither of usquite knew what was coming, and we thrilled with pleasure when he said:

“Jim, you and Bob have fairly outdone my expectations. I have had my eyeon both of you and I want you to know that the kind of industry andbusiness intelligence you have shown here would have won you recognitionin any banking-house on ‘the Street.’ I want you both in the firm—Jim tolearn his way round so he can step into my shoes; you, Bob, to take one ofthe firm’s seats on the Stock Exchange.”

Bob’s face went red and then pale with happiness as he reached for myfather’s hand.

“I’m very grateful to you sir, far more so than any words can say, but Iwant to talk this proposition of yours over with Jim here first. He knowsme better than any one else in the world and I’ve some ideas I’d like tothrash out with him.”

“Speak up here, Bob,” said my father.

“Well, sir, I should feel much better if I could go over there into theswirl and smash it out for myself. You see if I could win out alone andpay back the seat price, and then make a pile for myself, if you feltlater like giving me another chance to come into the firm, then I shouldnot be laying myself open to the charge of being a mere pensioner on yourfriendship. You know what I mean, sir, and won’t think I am filled withany low-down pride, but if you will let me have the price of a StockExchange seat on my note, and will give me the chance, when I get the hangof the ropes, to handle some of the firm’s orders, I shall be just as muchbeholden to you and Jim, sir, and shall feel a lot better myself.”

I knew what Bob meant; so did father, and we were glad enough to do whathe asked, father insisting on making the seat price in the form of apresent, after explaining to us that a foundation Stock Exchange ruleprohibited an applicant from borrowing the seat price. Four years afterBob Brownley entered the Stock Exchange he had paid back the fortythousand, with interest, and not only had a snug fifty thousand to hiscredit on Randolph & Randolph’s books, but was sending home six thousand ayear while living up to, as he jokingly put it, “an honest man’s notch.” Imay say in passing, that a Wall Street man’s notch would make twice sixthousand yearly earnings cast an uncertain shadow at Christmas time. Bobwas the favourite of the Exchange, as he had been the pet at school and atcollege, and had his hands full of business three hundred days in theyear. Besides Randolph & Randolph’s choicest commissions, he had theconfidential orders of two of the heavy plunging cliques.

I had just passed my thirty-second birthday when my kind old dad suddenlydied. For the previous six years I had been getting ready for such anevent; that is, I had grown accustomed to hearing my father say: “Jim,don’t let any grass grow in getting the hang of every branch of ourbusiness, so that when anything happens to me there will be no disturbancein ‘the Street’ in regard to Randolph & Randolph’s affairs. I want to letthe world know as soon as possible that after I am gone our business willrun as it always has. So I will work you into my directorships in thosecompanies where we have interests and gradually put you into my differenttrusteeships.”

Thus at father’s death there was not a ripple in our affairs and none ofthe stocks known as “The Randolph’s” fluttered a point because of that, tothe financial world, momentous event. I inherited all of father’s fortuneother than four millions, which he divided up among relatives andcharities, and took command of a business that gave me an income of twomillions and a half a year.

Once more I begged Bob to come into the firm.

“Not yet, Jim,” he replied. “I’ve got my seat and about a hundred thousandcapital, and I want to feel that I’m free to kick my heels until I haveraked together an even million all of my own making; then I’ll settle downwith you, old man, and hold my handle of the plough, and if some good girlhappens along about that time—well, then it will be ‘An ivy-coveredlittle cot’ for mine.”

He laughed, and I laughed too. Bob was looked upon by all his friends as abad case of woman-shy. No woman, young or old, who had in any way crossedBob’s orbit but had felt that fascination, delicious to all women, in thepresence of:

A soul by honour schooled,
A heart by passion ruled—

but he never seemed to see it. As my wife—for I had been three yearsmarried and had two little Randolphs to show that both Katherine Blair andI knew what marriage was for—never tired of saying, “Poor Bob! He’swoman-blind, and it looks as though he would never get his sight in thatdirection.”

“Then again, Jim,” he continued in a tone of great seriousness, “there’s alittle secret I have never let even you into. The truth is I am not safeyet—not safe to speak for the old house of Randolph & Randolph. Yes, youmay laugh—you who are, and always have been, as staunch and steady as theold bronze John Harvard in the yard, you who know Monday mornings justwhat you are going to do Saturday nights and all the days and nights inbetween, and who always do it. Jim, I have found since I have been over onthe floor that the Southern gambling blood that made my grandfather, onone of his trips back from New York, though he had more land and slavesthan he could use, stake his land and slaves—yes, and grandmother’stoo—on a card-game, and—lose, and change the whole face of the Brownleydestiny—those same gambling microbes are in my blood, and when they beginto claw and gnaw I want to do something; and, Jim”—and the big brown eyessuddenly shot sparks—“if those microbes ever get unleashed, there’ll bemischief to pay on the floor—sure there will!”

Bob’s handsome head was thrown back; his thin nostrils dilated as thoughthere was in them the breath of conflict. The lips were drawn across thewhite teeth with just part enough to show their edges, and in the depthsof the eyes was a dark-red blaze that somehow gave the impression one getsin looking down some long avenue of black at the instant a locomotiveheadlight rounds a curve at night.

Twice before, way back in our college days, I had had a peep at thisgambling tempter of Bob’s. Once in a poker game in our rooms, when a crowdof New York classmates tried to run him out of a hand by the sheer weightof coin. And again at the Pequot House at New London on the eve of avarsity boat-race, when a Yale crowd shook a big wad of money and tauntsat Bob until with a yell he left his usually well-leaded feet andfrightened me, whose allowance was dollars to Bob’s cents, at the sumtotal of the bet-cards he signed before he cleared the room of Yale moneyand came to with a white face streaming with cold perspiration. Theseevents had passed out of my memory as the ordinary student breaks that anyhot-blooded youth is liable to make in like circumstances. As I looked atBob that day, while he tried to tell me that the business of Randolph &Randolph would not be safe in his keeping, I had to admit to myself that Iwas puzzled. I had regarded my old college chum not only as the bestmentally harnessed man I had ever met, but I knew him as the soul ofhonour, that honour of the old story-books, and I could not credit hisbeing tempted to jeopardise unfairly the rights or property of another.But it was habit with me to let Bob have his way, and I did not press himto come into our firm as a full partner.

Five years later, during which time affairs, business and social, had beenslipping along as well as either Bob or I could have asked, I waspreparing for another sit-down to show my chum that the time had now comefor him to help me in earnest, when a queer thing happened—one of thoseunaccountable incidents that God sometimes sees fit to drop across thelife-paths of His children, paths heretofore as straight andfar-ahead-visible as highways along which one has never to look twice tosee where he is travelling; one of those events that, looked atretrospectively, are beyond all human understanding.

It was a beautiful July Saturday noon and Bob and I had just “packed up”for the day preparatory to joining Mrs. Randolph on my yacht for a rundown to our place at Newport. As we stepped out of his office one of theclerks announced that a lady had come in and had particularly asked to seeMr. Brownley.

“Who the deuce can she be, coming in at this time on Saturday, just whenall alive men are in a rush to shake the heat and dirt of business forfood and the good air of all outdoors?” growled Bob. Then he said, “Showher in.”

Another minute and he had his answer.

A lady entered.

“Mr. Brownley?” She waited an instant to make sure he was the Virginian.

Bob bowed.

“I am Beulah Sands, of Sands Landing, Virginia. Your people know ourpeople, Mr. Brownley, probably well enough for you to place me.”

“Of the Judge Lee Sands’s?” asked Bob, as he held out his hand.

“I am Judge Lee Sands’s oldest daughter,” said the sweetest voice I hadever heard, one of those mellow, rippling voices that start theimagination on a chase for a mocking-bird, only to bring it up at the poolbeneath the brook-fall in quest of the harp of moss and watercresses thatsends a bubbling cadence into its eddies and swirls. Perhaps it was theSouthern accent that nibbled off the corners and edges of certain wordsand languidly let others mist themselves together, that gave it itsluscious penetration—however that may be, it was the mostno-yesterday-no-tomorrow voice I had ever heard. Before I grew fullyconscious of the exquisite beauty of the girl, this voice of hers spelledits way into my brain like the breath of some bewitching Oriental essence.Nature, environment, the security of a perfect marriage have evercombined to constitute me loyal to my chosen one, yet as I stood silent,like one dumb, absorbing the details of the loveliness of this youngstranger who had so suddenly swept into my office, it came over me thathere was a woman intended to enlighten men who could not understand thatshaft which in all ages has without warning pierced men’s hearts andsouls—love at first sight. Had there not been Katherine Blair, wife andmother—Katherine Blair Randolph, who filled my love-world as the noondayAugust sun fills the old-fashioned well with nestling warmth and restfulshade—after this interval, looking back at the past, I dare ask thequestion—who knows but that I too might have drifted from the secureanchorage of my slow Yankee blood and floated into the deep waters?

Beauty, the cynic’s scoff, is in the eye of the beholder, or in an angleof vision—mere product of lime-light, point of view, desire—but BeulahSands’s was beauty beyond cavil, superior to all analysis, as definite asthe evening star against the twilight sky. In height medium, girlish, butwith a figure maturely modelled, charmingly full and rounded, yet by veryperfection of proportion escaping suggestion of “plumpness.” The head,surrounded and crowned with a wealth of dark golden hair, rested on a neckthat would have seemed short had its slender column sprung less graciouslyfrom the lovely lines of the breast and shoulders beneath. It was on theface, however, and finally on the eyes that one’s glances inevitablylingered—the face rose-tinted, with dimples in either of the full cheeks,entering laughing protest against the sad droop that brought slightly downthe corners of a mouth too large perhaps for beauty, if the coral curve ofthe lips had been less exquisitely perfect. The straight, thin-nostrilednose, the broad forehead, the square, full jaw almost as low at the pointswhere they come beneath the ears as at the chin, suggested dignity andhigh resolve coupled with a power of purpose, rare in woman. Thecombination of forehead, jaw, and nose was seldom seen. Had it beenpossessed by a man it would surely have driven him to the tented field forhis profession. But the greatest glory of Beulah Sands was hereyes—large, full, very gray, very blue, vivid with all the glamour of herpersonality, full of smiles and tears and spirituality and passion; oneinstant, frankly innocent, they illuminated the face of a blonde Madonna;the next, seen through the extraordinary, long, jet-black eye-lashesunderneath the finely pencilled black brows, they caressed, coquetted,allured. I afterward found much of this girl’s purely physical fascinationlay in this strange blending of English fairness with Andalusian tints,though the abiding quality of her charm was surely in an exaltation ofspirit of which she might make the dullest conscious. As she stood lookingat Bob in my office that long-ago noon, gracefully at ease in a suit ofgray, with a gray-feathered turban on her head, and tiny lace bands atneck and wrist, she was very exquisite, exceedingly dainty, and, thoughSoutherner of Southerners, very unlike the typical brunette girl who comesout of Dixie land.

This girl who came into our office that July Saturday, just in time tointerfere with the outing Bob Brownley and I had laid out, and who wasdestined to divert my chum’s heretofore smooth-flowing river of existenceand turn it into an alternation of roaring rushes and deadly calms, wastruly the most exquisite creature one could conceive of, I know mythought must have been Bob’s too, for his eyes were riveted on her face.She dropped the black lashes like a veil as she went on:

“Mr. Brownley, I have just come from Sands Landing. I am very anxious totalk with you on a business matter. I have brought a letter to you from myfather. If you have other engagements I can wait until Monday, although,”and the black veiling lashes lifted, showing the half-laughing,half-pathetic eyes, “I wanted much to lay my business before you at theearliest minute possible.”

There was a faint touch of appeal in the charming voice as she spoke thatwas irresistible, and we were both willing to forget we had lunch waitingus on theTribesman.

“Step into my office, Miss Sands, and all my time is yours,” said Bob, ashe opened the door between his office and mine. After I had sent a note tomy wife, saying we might be delayed for an hour or two, I settled down towait for Bob in the general office, and it was a long wait. Thirty minuteswent into an hour and an hour into two before Bob and Miss Sands came out.After he had put her in a cab for her hotel, he said in a tone curiouslyintent: “Jim, I have got to talk with you, got to get some of your goodadvice. Suppose we hustle along to the yacht and after lunch you tell Katewe have some business to go over. I don’t want to keep that girl waitingany longer than possible for an answer I cannot give until I get yourideas.” After lunch, on the bow end of the upper deck Bob relievedhimself. Relieved is the word, for from the minute he had put Miss Sandsinto the carriage until then, it was evident even to my wife that histhoughts were anywhere but upon our outing.

“Jim,” he began in a voice that shook in spite of his efforts to make itsound calm, “there is no disguising the fact that I am mightily worked upabout this matter, and I want to do everything possible for this girl. Noneed of my telling you how sacred we have got to keep what she has justlet me into. You’ll see as I go along that it is sacred, and I know youwill look at it as I do. Miss Sands must be helped out of her trouble.

“Judge Lee Sands, her father, is the head of the old Sands family ofVirginia. The Virginia Sands don’t take off their bonnets to anotherfamily in this country, or elsewhere, for that matter, for anything thatreally counts. They have had brains, learning, money, and fixed positionsince Virginia was first settled. They are the best people of our State.It is a cross-road saying in Virginia that a Sands of Sands Landing can goto the bench, the United States Senate, the House, or the governor’s chairfor the starting, and nearly all of the men folks have held one or all ofthese honours for generations. The present judge has held them all. Idon’t know him personally, although my people and his have been thick fromaway back. Sands Landing on the James is some fifty miles above our home.The judge, Beulah Sands’s father, is close on to seventy, and I have heardmother and father say is a stalwart, a Virginia stalwart. Being rich—thatis, what we Virginians call rich, a million or so—he has been very activein affairs, and I knew before his daughter told me, that he was thetrustee for about all the best estates in our part of the country. Itseems from what she tells, that of late he has been very active indeveloping our coal-mines and railroads, and that particularly he took aprominent hand in the Seaboard Air Line. You know the road, for yourfather was a director, and I think the house has been prominent in itsbanking affairs. Now, Jim, this poor girl, who, it seems, has recentlybeen acting as the judge’s secretary, has just learned that that coup ofReinhart and his crowd has completely ruined her father. The decline hasswamped his own fortune, and, what is worse, a million to a million and ahalf of his trust funds as well, and the old judge—well, you and I canunderstand his position. Yet I do not know that you just can, either, foryou do not quite understand our Virginia life and the kind of reveredposition a man like Judge Sands occupies. You would have to know that tounderstand fully his present purgatory and the terrible position of thisdaughter, for it seems that since he began to get into deep water he hasbeen relying upon her for courage and ideas. From our talk I gather shehas a wonderful store of up-to-date business notions, and I am convincedfrom what she lays out that the judge’s affairs are hopeless, and, Jim,when that old man goes down it will be a smash that will shake our Statein more ways than one.

“Up to now the girl has stood up to the blow like a man and has been ableto steady the judge until he presents an exterior that holds downsuspicion as to his real financial condition, although she says Reinhartand his Baltimore lawyer, from the ruthless way they put on the screws toshake out his holdings in the Air Line, must have a line on it that thejudge is overboard. The old gentleman can keep things going for six monthslonger without jeopardising any of the remaining trust funds, of which hehas some two millions, and while his wife, who is an invalid, knows thejudge is in some trouble, she does not suspect his real position. Hisdaughter says that when the blow came, that day of the panic, whenReinhart jammed the stock out of sight and scuttled her father’s bankersand partners in the road, the Wilsons of Baltimore, she had a frightfulstruggle to keep her father from going insane. She told me that for threedays and nights she kept him locked in their rooms at their hotel inBaltimore, to prevent him from hunting Reinhart and his lawyer Rettyboneand killing them both, but that at last she got him calmed down andtogether they have been planning.

“Jim, it was tough to sit there and listen to the schemes to recoup thatthis old gentleman and this girl, for she is only twenty-one, have triedto hatch up. The tears actually rolled down my cheeks as I listened; Icouldn’t help it; you couldn’t either, Jim. But at last out of all theplans considered, they found only one that had a tint of hope in it, andthe serious mention of even that one, Jim, in any but presentcircumstances, would make you think we were dealing with lunatics. But thegirl has succeeded in making me think it worth trying. Yes, Jim, she has,and I have told her so, and I hope to God that that hard-headedhorse-sense of yours will not make you sit down on it.”

Bob Brownley had got to his feet; he was slipping the shackles of thatfiery, romantic, Southern passion that years in college and Wall Streethad taught him to keep prisoner. His eyes were flashing sparks. Hisnostrils vibrated like a deer buck’s in the autumn woods. He faced me withhis hands clinched.

“Jim Randolph,” he went on, “as I listened to that girl’s story of theterrible cruelty and devilish treachery practised by the human hyenas youand I associate with, human hyenas who, when in search of dirtydollars—the only thing they know anything about—put to shame the realbeasts of the wilds—when I listened, I tell you that I felt it would notgive me a twinge of conscience to put a ball through that slick scoundrelReinhart. Yes, and that hired cur of his, too, who prostitutes a goodfamily name and position, and an inherited ability the Almighty intendedfor more honest uses than the trapping of victims on whose purses hisgutter-born master has set lecherous eyes. And, Jim, as I listened, atroop of old friends invaded my memory—friends whom I have not seen sincebefore I went to Harvard, friends with whom I spent many a happy hour inmy old Virginia home, friends born of my imagination, stalwart, ruggedcrusaders, who carried the sword and the cross and the banner inscribed‘For Honour and for God.’ Old friends who would troop into my boyhood andtrumpet, ‘Bob, don’t forget, when you’re a man, that the goal is honour,and the code: Do unto your neighbour as you would have your neighbour dounto you. Don’t forget that millions is the crest of the groundlings.’And, Jim, I thought my friends looked at me with reproachful eyes, asthey said, ‘You are well on the road, Bob Brownley, and in time your heartand soul will bear the hall-mark of the snaky S on the two upright bars,and you will be but a frenzied fellow in the Dirty Dollar army.’ Jim, JimRandolph, as I listened to that agonising tale of the changing of thatgirl’s heaven to hell, I did not see that halo you and I have thoughtsurrounded the sign of Randolph & Randolph. I did not see it, Jim, but Idid see myself, and I didn’t feel proud of the picture. My God, Jim, is itpossible you and I have joined the nobility of Dirty Dollars? Is itpossible we are leaving trails along our life’s path like that Reinhartleft through the home of these Virginians, such trails as this girl hasshown me?”

Bob had worked himself into a state of frenzy. I had never seen him soexcited as when he stood in front of me and almost shouted this fierceself-denunciation.

“For heaven’s sake, Bob, pull yourself together,” I urged. “The captain onthe bridge there is staring at you wild-eyed, and Katherine will be uphere to see what has happened. Now, be a good fellow, and let us talkthis thing over in a sensible way. At the gait you are going we can donothing to help out your friends. Besides, what is there for you and me totake ourselves to task for? We are no wreckers and none of our dollars isstained with Frenzied Finance. My father, as you know, despised Reinhartand his sort as much as we do. Be yourself. What does this girl want youto do? If it is anything in reason, call it done, for you know there isnothing I won’t do for you at the asking.”

Bob’s hysteria oozed. He dropped on the rail-seat at my side.

“I know it, Jim, I know it, and you must forgive me. The fact, is, BeulahSands’s story has aroused a lot of thoughts I have been a-sticking downcellar late years, for, to tell the truth, I have some nasty twinges ofconscience every now and then when I get to thinking of this dollar gameof ours.”

I saw that the impulsive blood was fast cooling, and that it would only bea question of minutes until Bob would be his clearheaded self.

“Now, what is it she wants you to do?” I persisted. “Is it a case ofmoney, of our trying to tide her father over?”

“Nothing of that kind, Jim. You don’t know the proud Virginia blood.Neither that girl nor her father would accept money help from any one.They would go to smash and the grave first.”

He paused and then continued impressively:

“This is how she puts it. She and her father have raked together herdifferent legacies and turned them into cash, a matter of sixty thousanddollars, and she got him to consent to let her come up here to see ifduring the next six months she might not, in a few desperate plunges inthe market, run it up to enough to at least regain the trust funds. Yes, Iknow it is a wild idea. I told her so at the beginning, but there was noneed; she knew it, for she is not only bright, but she has the best ideaof business I ever knew a woman to have. But it is their only chance, Jim,and while I listened to her argument I came around to her way ofthinking.”

“But how did she happen to come to you with this extraordinary scheme?” Iinterrupted.

“It’s this way—her father, who knew Randolph & Randolph through yourfather’s handling of the Seaboard’s affairs, learned of my connectionwith the house, and gave her a letter, asking me to do what I could tohelp his daughter carry out her plans. She wants to get a position withus, if possible, in some sort of capacity, secretary, confidential clerk,or, as she puts it, any sort of place that will justify her being in theoffice. She tells me she is good at shorthand, on the machine, or atcorrespondence, also that she has been a contributor to the magazines. Ifthis can be arranged, she says she will on her own responsibility selectthe time and the stock, and hurl the last of the Sands fortune at themarket, and, Jim, she is game. The blow seems to have turned this childinto a wonderfully nervy creature, and, old man, I am beginning to have afeeling that perhaps the cards may come so she will win the judge out. Youand I know where less than sixty thousand has been run up to millions morethan once, and that, too, without the aid she will have, for I’ll surelydo all I can to help her steer this last chance into spongy places.”

Bob in his enthusiasm had completely lost sight of the fact that he wasindorsing a project that but a moment previously he had pronounced insane,and with a start I realised what this sudden transformation betokened.Inevitably, if the project he outlined were carried out, Bob and thebeautiful Southern girl would be thrown into close association with eachother, and further acquaintance could only deepen the startling influenceBeulah Sands had already won over my ordinarily sane and cool-headedcomrade. As I looked at my friend, burning with an ardour as unaccustomedas it was impulsive, I felt a tug at my heartstrings at thought of thesudden cross-roading of his life’s highway. But I, too, was filled withthe glamour of this girl’s wondrous beauty, and her terrible predicamentappealed to me almost as strongly as it had to Bob. So, although I knew itwould be fatal to any chance of his weighing the matter by common sense, Iburst out:

“Bob, I don’t blame you for falling in with the girl’s plans. If I were inyour shoes, I should too.”

Tears came to Bob’s eyes as he grabbed my hand and said:

“Jim, how can I ever repay you for all the good things you have done forme—how can I!”

It was no time to give way to emotional outbursts, and while Bob wasgetting his grip on himself, I went on:

“Come along down to earth now, Bob; let us look at this thing squarely.You and I, with our position in the market, can do lots of things to helprun that sixty thousand to higher figures, but six months is a short timeand a million or two a world of money.”

“She knows that,” he said, “and the time is much shorter and the road togo much longer than you figure,” he replied. “This girl is ashigh-tensioned as the E string on a Stradivarius, and she declares shewill have no charity tips or unusual favours from us or any one else. Butlet us not talk about that now or we’ll get discouraged. Let’s do as shesays and trust to God for the outcome. Are you willing, Jim, to take herinto the office as a sort of confidential secretary? If you will, I’lltake charge of her account, and together we will do all that two men canfor her and her father.”

Chapter II.

The following week saw Miss Sands, of Virginia, private secretary to thehead of Randolph & Randolph, established in a little office between mineand Bob’s. She had not been there a day before we knew she was a worker.She spent the hours going over reports and analysing financial statements,showing a sagacity extraordinary in so young a person. She explained herknowledge of figures by the hand-work she had done for the judge, all ofwhose accounts she had kept. Bob and I saw that she was bent on smotheringher memory in that antidote for all ills of heart and soul—work. Heroffice life was simplicity itself. She spoke to no one except Bob, save inconnection with such business matters of the firm’s as I might send her byone of the clerks to attend to. To the others in the banking-house she wasjust an unconventional young literary woman whose high social connectionshad gained her this opportunity of getting at the secrets of finance,from actual experience, for use in forthcoming novels. It had got abroadthat she was the writer of great distinction who, under anom de plume,had recently made quite a dent in the world’s literary shell—a suggestionthat I rightly guessed was one of Bob’s delicate ways of smoothing out herpath. I had tried in every way to make things easy for her, but it wasimpossible for me to draw her out in talk, and finally I gave it up. Hadit not been that every time I passed her office door I was compelled bythe fascination which I had first felt, and which, instead of diminishing,had increased with her reticence, to look in at the quiet figure with thedowncast eyes, working away at her desk as though her life depended onnever missing a second, I should not have known she was in the building.My wife, at my suggestion, had tried to induce her to visit us; in fact,after I let her into just enough of Beulah Sands’s story so that she couldsee things on a true slant, she had decided to try to bring her to ourhouse to live. But though the girl was sweetly gentle in her appreciationof Kate’s thoughtful attentions, in her simple way she made us both feelthat our efforts would be for naught, that her position must be the sameas that of any other clerk in the office. We both finally left her toherself. Bob explained to me, some three weeks after she came to theoffice, that she received no visitors at her home, a hotel on a quietuptown street, and that even he had never had permission to call upon herthere.

But from the day she came to occupy her desk in our office, Bob was achanged man, whether for better or for worse neither Kate nor I coulddecide. His old bounding elasticity was gone, and with it his rollickinglaugh. He was now a man where before he had been a boy, a man with aburden. Even if I had not heard Beulah Sands’s story, I should haveguessed that Bob was staggering under a strange load. While before, fromthe close of the Stock Exchange until its opening the next morning, hewas, as Kate was fond of putting it, always ready to fill in for anythingfrom chaperon to nurse, always open for any lark we planned, from aBohemian dinner to the opera, now weeks went by without our seeing him atour house. In the office it used to be a saying that outside gong-strikes,Bob Brownley did not know he was in the stock business. Formerly everyclerk knew when Bob came or went, for it was with a rush, a shout, alaugh, and a bang of doors; and on the floor of the Stock Exchange no manplayed so many pranks, or filled his orders with so much jolly good-natureand hilarious boisterousness. But from the day the Virginian girl crossedhis path, Bob Brownley was a man who was thinking, thinking, thinking allthe time. It was only with an effort that he would keep his eyes onwhomever he was talking with long enough to take in what was said, and ifthe saying occupied much time it would be apparent to the talker that Bobwas off in the clouds. All his friends and associates remarked the change,but I alone, except perhaps Kate, had any idea of the cause. I knew thattwo million dollars and the coming New Year were hurdling like kangaroosover Bob’s mental rails and ditches, though I did not know it fromanything he told me, for after that talk on the upper deck of theTribesman he had shut up like a clam.

He did not exactly shun me, but showed me in many ways that he had enteredinto a new world, in which he desired to be alone. That Beulah Sands’splight had roused into intense activity all the latent romance of myfriend’s nature, did not surprise me. I foresaw from the first that Bobwould fall head over heels in love with this beautiful, sorrow-laden girl,and it was soon obvious that the long-delayed shaft had planted its pointin the innermost depths of his being. His was more than love; a fervididolatry now had possession of his soul, mind, and body. Yet its outwardmanifestations were the opposite of what one would have looked for in thisgay and optimistic Southerner. It was rather priest-like worship, a calmimperturbability that nothing seemed to distract or upset, at least in thepresence of the goddess who was its object. Every morning he would passthrough my office headed straight for the little room she occupied as ifit were his one objective point of the day, but once he heard his own“Good morning, Miss Sands,” he seemed to round to, and while in herpresence was the Bob Brownley of old. He would be in and out all day onany and every pretext, always entering with an undisguised eagerness,leaving with a slow, dreamy reluctance. That he never saw her outside theoffice, I am sure, for she said good-night to him when he or she left forthe day with the same don’t-come-with-me dignity that she exhibited toall the rest of us. I had not attempted to say a word to Bob about hisfeeling for Beulah Sands, nor had he ever brought up the subject to me. Onthe contrary, he studiously avoided it.

Three months of the six had now passed, and with each day I thought Inoted an increasing anxiety in Bob. He had opened a special account forMiss Sands on the books of the house in his name as agent, with a creditof sixty thousand dollars, and we both watched it with a painful tensenessof scrutiny. It had grown by uneven jerks, until the balance on October1st was almost four hundred thousand dollars. On some of the trades Bobhad consulted me, and on others, two in particular where he closed upafter a few days’ operations with nearly two hundred thousand dollarsprofit, I did not even know what the trading was based on until the stockshad been sold. Then he said:

“Jim, that little lady from Virginia can give us a big handicap and playus to a standstill at our own game. She told me to buy all the Burlingtonand Sugar her account would stand, and did not even ask for my opinion. Inboth cases I thought the operations were more the result of a wakefulnight and an I-must-do-something decision than anything else, and Itackled both with a shiver; but when she told me to sell them out at atime I thought they looked like going higher and the next day theyslumped, I could not help thinking about the destiny that shapes ourends.”

On my part I tried to help. On one occasion, without consulting her, I puther account in on a sure thing underwriting, wherein she stood to make aprofit of a quarter of a million, but when Bob told her what I had done,she insisted with great dignity that her name be withdrawn. After thatneither of us dared help her to any short cuts. Bob was deeply impressedby her principles, and, commenting on them, said: “Jim, if all Wall Streethad a code similar to Beulah Sands’s to hew to in their gambles, ourswould be a fairer and more manly game, and many of the multi-millionaireswould be clerking, while a lot of the hand-to-mouth traders would comedowntown in a new auto every day in the week. She does not believe instock-gambling. She has worked it out that every dollar one man makes,another loses; that the one who makes gives nothing in return for what hegets away with; and that the other fellow’s loss makes him and his asmiserable as would robbery to the same amount. Yet she realises that shemust get back those millions stolen from her father and is willing tosmother her conscience to attempt it, provided she takes no unfairadvantage of the other players. The other day she said to me, ‘I havedecided, because of my duty to my father, to put away my prejudice againstgambling, but no duty to him or to any one can justify me in playing withmarked cards.’ Jim, there is food for reflection for you and me, don’t youthink so?”

I did not argue it with him, for, after that Saturday’s outburst, I hadmade up my mind to avoid stirring Bob up unnecessarily. Also, I had toadmit to myself that the things he had then said had raised someuncomfortable thoughts in me, thoughts that made me glance lessconfidently now and then at the old sign of Randolph & Randolph and at thebig ledger which showed that I, an ordinary citizen of a free country, wasthe absolute possessor of more money than a hundred thousand of my fellowbeings together could accumulate in a lifetime, although each one hadworked harder, longer, more conscientiously, and with perhaps more abilitythan I.

As to how Beulah Sands’s code had affected my friend, I was ignorant. Forthe first time in our association I was completely in the dark as to whathe was doing stockwise. Up to that Saturday I was the first to whom hewould rush for congratulations when he struck it rich over others on theexchange, and he invariably sought me for consolation when the boys“upper-cut him hard,” as he would put it. Now he never said a word abouthis trading. I saw that his account with the house was inactive, that hisbalance was about the same as before Miss Sands’s advent, and I came tothe conclusion that he was resting on his oars and giving his undividedattention to her account and the execution of his commissions. Hishandling of the business of the house showed no change. He still was thebest broker on the floor. However, knowing Bob as I did, I could not getit out of my mind that his brain was running like a mill-race in search ofsome successful solution to the tremendous problem that must be solved inthe next three months.

Shortly after the October 1st statements had been sent out, Bob droppedin on Kate and me one night. After she had retired and we had lit ourcigars in the library he said:

“Jim, I want some of that old-fashioned advice of yours. Sugar is sellingat 110, and it is worth it; in fact it is cheap. The stock is welldistributed among investors, not much of it floating round ‘the Street.’ Agood, big buying movement, well handled, would jump it to 175 and keep itthere. Am I sound?”

I agreed with him.

“All right. Now what reason is there for a good, big, stiff uplift? Thattariff bill is up at Washington. If it goes through, Sugar will be cheaperat 175 than at 110.”

Again I agreed.

“‘Standard Oil’ and the Sugar people know whether it is going through, forthey control the Senate and the House and can induce the President to begood. What do you say to that?”

“O.K.,” I answered.

“No question about it, is there?”

“Not the slightest.”

“Right again. When 26 Broadway^[1] gives the secret order to theWashington boss and he passes it out to the grafters, there will be aquiet accumulation of the stock, won’t there?”

[1]“26 Broadway” is the Wall Street figure of speech for“Standard Oil,” which has its home there.

“You’ve got that right, Bob.”

“And the man who first knows when Washington begins to take on Sugar isthe man who should load up quick and rush it up to a high level. If hedoes it quickly, the stockholders, who now have it, will get a juicy sliceof the ripening melon, a slice that otherwise would go to those greedyhypocrites at Washington, who are always publicly proclaiming that theyare there to serve their fellow countrymen, but who never tire ofexpressing themselves to their brokers as not being in politics for theirhealth.”

“So far, good reasoning,” I commented.

“Jim, the man who first knows when the Senators and Congressmen andmembers of the Cabinet begin to buy Sugar, is the man who can kill fourbirds with one stone: Win back a part of Judge Sands’s stolen fortune;increase his own pile against the first of January, when, if the littleVirginian lady is short a few hundred thousand of the necessary amount,he could, if he found a way to induce her to accept it, supply thedeficiency; fatten up a good friend’s bank account a million or so, and doa right good turn for the stockholders who are about to be, for thehundredth time, bled out of profit rightfully theirs.”

Bob was afire with enthusiasm, the first I had seen him show for threemonths. Seeing that I had followed him without objection so far, hecontinued:

“Well, Jim, I know the Washington buying has begun. All I know I have dugout for myself and am free to use it any way I choose. I have gone overthe deal with Beulah Sands, and we have decided to plunge. She has abalance of about four hundred thousand dollars, and I’m going to spread itthin. I am going to buy her 20,000 shares and to take on 10,000 formyself. If you went in for 20,000 more, it would give me a wide sea tosail in. I know you never speculate, Jim, for the house, but I thought youmight in this case go in personally.”

“Don’t say anything more, Bob,” I replied. “This time the rule goes by theboard. But I will do better: I’ll put up a million and you can go as highas 70,000 for me. That will give you a buying power of 100,000, and Iwant you to use my last 50,000 shares as a lifter.”

I had never speculated in a share of stock since I entered the firm ofRandolph & Randolph, and on general, special, and every other principlewas opposed to stock gambling, but I saw how Bob had worked it out, andthat to make the deal sure it was necessary for him to have a good reservebuying power to fall back on if, after he got started, the “System”masters, whose game he was butting in to and whose plans he might upsetshould try to shake down the price to drive him out of their preserves.Bob knew how I looked at his proposed deal and ordinarily would not haveallowed me to have the short end of it, but so changed had he become inhis anxiety to make that money for the Virginians that he grabbed at myacceptance.

“Thank you, Jim,” he said fervently, and he continued: “Of course, I seewhat’s going through your head, but I’ll accept the favour, for the dealis bound to be successful. I know your reason for coming in is just tohelp out, and that you won’t feel badly because your last 50,000 shareswill be used more as a guarantee for the deal’s success than for profit.And Miss Sands could not object to the part you play, as she did at theunderwriting, for you will get a big profit anyway.”

Next day Sugar was lively on the Exchange. Bob bought all in sight andhandled the buying in a masterly way. When the closing gong struck, BeulahSands had 20,000 shares, which averaged her 115; Bob and I had 30,000 atan average of 125, and the stock had closed 132 bid and in big demand.Miss Sands’s 20,000 showed $340,000 profit, while our 30,000 showed$210,000 at the closing price. All the houses with Washington wires werewildly scrambling for Sugar as soon as it began to jump. And it certainlylooked as though the shares were good for the figures set for them by Bob,$175, at which price the Sands’s profits would be $1,200,000. Bob wasbeside himself with joy. He dined with Kate and me, and as I watched himmy heart almost stopped beating at the thought—“if anything should happento upset his plans!” His happiness was pathetic to witness. He was like achild. He threw away all the reserve of the past three months and laughedand was grave by turns. After dinner, as we sat in the library over ourcoffee, he leaned over to my wife and said:

“Katherine Randolph, you and Jim don’t know what misery I have been in forthree months, and now—will to-morrow never come, so I may get into thewhirl and clean up this deal and send that girl back to her father withthe money! I wanted her to telegraph the judge that things looked like shewould win out and bring back the relief, but she would not hear of it. Sheis a marvellous woman. She has not turned a hair to-day. I don’t think herpulse is up an eighth to-night. She has not sent home a word ofencouragement since she has been here, more than to tell her father she isdoing well with her stories. It seems they both agreed that the only wayto work the thing out was ‘whole hog or none,’ and that she was to saynothing until she could herself bring the word ‘saved’ or ‘lost.’ I don’tknow but she is right. She says if she should raise her father’s hopes,and then be compelled to dash them, the effect would be fatal.”

Bob rushed the talk along, flitting from one point to another, butinvariably returning to Beulah Sands and to-morrow and its savingprofits. Finally, he got to a pitch where it seemed as though he must takeoff the lid, and before Kate or I realised what was coming he placedhimself in front of us and said:

“Jim, Kate, I cannot go into to-morrow without telling you something thatneither of you suspect. I must tell some one, now that everything iscoming out right and that Beulah is to be saved; and whom can I tell butyou, who have been everything to me?—I love Beulah Sands, surely, deeply,with every bit of me. I worship her, I tell you, and to-morrow, to-morrowif this deal comes out as it must come, and I can put $1,500,000 into herhands and send her home to her father, then, then, I will tell her I loveher, and Jim, Kate, if she’ll marry me, good-bye, good-bye to this hell ofdollar-hunting, good-bye to such misery as I have been in for threemonths, and home, a Virginia home, for Beulah and me.” He sank into achair and tears rolled down his cheeks Poor, poor Bob, strong as a lion inadversity, hysterical as a woman with victory in sight.

The next day Sugar opened with a wild rush: “25,000 shares from 140 to152.” That is the way it came on the tape, which meant that the crowdaround the Sugar-pole was a mob and that the transactions were so heavy,quick, and tangled that no one could tell to a certainty just what thefirst or opening price was; but after the first lull, after the gong,there were officially reported transactions aggregating 25,000 shares andat prices varying from 140 to 152. I was over on the floor to see thescramble, for it was noised about long before ten o’clock that Sugar wouldopen wild, and then, too, I wanted to be handy if Bob should need anyquick advice.

A minute before the gong struck, there were three hundred men jammedaround the Sugar-pole; men with set, determined faces; men with theircoats buttoned tight and shoulders thrown back for the rush to which, bycomparison, that of a football team is child’s play. Every man in thatcrowd was a picked man, picked for what was coming. Each felt that uponhis individual powers to keep a clear head, to shout loudest, to forgetnothing, to keep his feet, and to stay as near the centre of the crowd aspossible, depended his “floor honour,” perhaps his fortune, or, what wasmore to him, his client’s fortune. Nearly every man of them was a collegegraduate who had won his spurs at athletics or a seasoned floor man whosetraining had been even more severe than that of the college campus. Whenit is known before the opening of the Exchange that there are to be“things doing” in a certain stock, it is the rule to send only the pickedfloor men into the crowd. There may be a fortune to make or to lose in aminute or a sliver of a minute. For instance, the man who that morning wasable to snatch the first 5,000 shares sold at 140 could have resold them afew minutes afterward at 152 and secured $60,000 profit. And the man whowas sent into the crowd by his client to sell 5,000 shares at the“opening” and who got but 140, when the price would be 152 by the time hereported to his customer, was a man to be pitied. Again, the trader whothe night before had decided that Sugar had gone up too fast, and who had“shorted” (that is, sold what he did not have, with the intention ofrepurchasing at a lower price than he sold it for) 5,000 shares at 140 andwho, finding himself in that surging mob with Sugar selling at 152, couldonly get out by taking a loss of $60,000, or by taking another chance oflater paying 162—such a trader was also to be pitied.

No one who scanned the crowd that morning would have believed that thecalm, set face on that erect Indian figure, occupying the very centre ofthat horde of gamblers who were only awaiting the ringing clang of thegong to hurl themselves like madmen at each other, was the hysterical manwho the night before was wildly praying for this moment. Nearly every manin that crowd was calm, but Bob Brownley was the calmest of them all. It’sthe Exchange code that at any cost of heart or nerve-tear a man mustretain good form until the gong strikes. Then, that he must be as near theuncaged tiger as human mind and body can be made. Only I realised whatvolcano raged inside my chum’s bosom. If any other man of the crowd hadknown, Bob’s chances of success would have been on par with a Canadiancanoeist short-cutting Niagara for Buffalo. Nine-tenths of the StockExchange game is not letting your left brain-lobe know what race yourright is in until the winning numbers and the also-rans are on the board.If one of those three hundred chain-lightning thinkers or any of theirten thousand alert associates knew in advance the intentions of a fellowbroker, the word would sweep through that crowd with the sureness ofuncorked ether, and the other two hundred and ninty nine, at gong-strike,would be at each others’ throats for his vitals, and before he knew thegame had started would have his bones picked to a vulture-finishcleanness. Suddenly, as I watched the scene, there rang through the greathall the first sharp stroke of the gong. There were no echoes heard thatmorning. The metallic voice was yet shaping its command to “at ’em, youfiends” when from three hundred throats burst the wild sound of the StockExchange yell. No other sound in any of the open or hidden places of allnature duplicates the yell of a great Stock Exchange at an excitingopening. It not only fills and refills space, for the volume is terrific,but it has an individuality all its own, coming from the incisive“take-mine-I’ve-got yours,” from the aggressive, almost arrogant“you-can’t-you-won’t-have-your-way,” the confident “by-heaven-I-will”individual notes that enter into the whole, as they blend with the shrillscream of triumph and the die-away note of disappointment, when the floormen realise their success or their failure. I picked Bob’s magnificentlyresonant voice from the mass—“40 for any part of 10,000 Sugar.” It wasthis daring bid that struck terror to the bears and filled the bulls^[2]with a frenzy of encouragement. Again it rang out—“45 for any part of25,000”; and a third time—“50 for any part of 50,000.”

[2]Those who seek to depress the price of a stock are known as bears, and thosewho oppose them by trying to raise the price are bulls.

The great crowd was surging all over the room. Hats were smashed and coatswere being stripped from their owners’ backs as though made of paper, andnow and then a particularly frantic buyer or seller would be borne to thefloor by the impetus of those who sought to fill his bid or grab hisoffer. Through all the wild whirl, straight and erect and commanding wasthe form of Bob, his face cold and expressionless as an iceberg. In fiveminutes the human mass had worked back to the Sugar-pole and there was theinevitable lull while its members “verified.”

I could see by the few entries Bob was making on his pad that he had beencompelled to buy but little. This meant that his campaign was workingsmoothly, that he was driving the market up by merely bidding, and thathe had the greater part of my 50,000 yet unbought, which inturn meant hecould continue to push up the price, or in the event of his opponents’attempting to run it down, he would be under the market with bigsupporting orders.

Suddenly the lull was broken. Bob’s voice rang out again—“153 for anypart of 10,000 Sugar.” Again the gamblers closed in and for another fiveminutes the opening scene was duplicated, with only a shade lessfierceness. After ten minutes’ mad trading a mighty burst of sound toldthat Sugar was 160 bid. Then Bob worked his way out of the crowd, andpassing by me fairly hissed, “By heaven, Jim, I’ve got them cinched!”

I went back to the office. In a few minutes Bob without a word strodethrough my office and into the little room occupied by Beulah Sands. Heclosed the door behind him, a thing that he had never done before. It wasonly a minute till he opened it and called to me. In his eyes was astrange look, a look that came from the blending of two mighty passions,one joy, the other I could not make out, unless it was that soft one,which suppressed love, emerging from terrible uncertainty, generates indeep natures and which usually finds vent in tears. Beulah Sands was astudy. Her heart was evidently swaying and tugging with the news Bob hadbrought her. She must have seen the nearness of release from the torturethat had been filling her soul during the past three months, and yet suchwas the remarkable self-control of the woman, such her noble courage, thatshe refused to show any outward sign of her feelings. She was thereserved, dignified girl I had ever seen her. “Jim, Miss Sands and Ithought it best that we should have a little match up at this stage of ourdeal,” Bob began. “I want to know if you both agree with me on adhering tothe original plans to close out at 175. I never felt surer of my groundthan in this deal. The stock is 163 on the tape right now.” He glanced atthe white paper ribbon whose every foot on certain days spells Heaven orHell to countless mortals, as it rolled out of the ticker in the corner ofthe office. “Yes, there she goes again—3¾, 4, 4¼ and 1,200 at a half.There is a tremendous demand from all quarters. Washington’s buying isunlimited; the commission-houses are tumbling over one another to getaboard and the shorts are scared to a paralysed muteness. They don’t knowwhether to jump in and cover or to stand their present hands, but theyhave no pluck to fight the rise, that is certain. The news bureaus havejust published the story that I am buying for Randolph & Randolph, andthey for the insiders; that the new tariff is as good as passed; and thatat the directors’ meeting to-morrow the Sugar dividend will be increased,and that it is agreed on all sides she won’t stop going until she crosses200. I’ve been obliged to take on only 18,000 of your 50,000, and atpresent prices there is over two hundred thousand profit in them. I thinkI could go back there and in thirty minutes have it to 180. Then if Irested on it until about one o’clock and threw myself at it for realfireworks up to the close, I could, under cover of them, let slip abouthalf our purchases, and to-morrow open her with a whirl and let go thebalance. If I’m in luck I’ll average 180-185 for the whole bunch, but I’llbe satisfied if I get an average of 175, which would allow me to sell iton a dropping scale to 160.”

I agreed that his campaign was perfect, and Beulah Sands said in herusual quiet way, “It is entirely in your hands, Mr. Brownley. I don’t seehow any advice from us can help.”

Bob went back to the Exchange and I into my office. Bob had been rightagain. In ten minutes the tape began to scream Sugar. With enormoustransactions it ran up in fifteen minutes to 188, in three more it droppedto 181, and then steadily mounted to 185½, dulled up, and was healthysteady. Presently Bob was back and we sat down again.

“I’ve bought 20,000 more for you, Jim, on that bulge. I’ve 38,000 in allof the last 50,000, which leaves me 12,000 reserve. The average is ‘wayunder 75, and there must be $400,000 for you in it now and a strong$1,400,000 in Miss Sands’s 20,000, and $1,800,000 in our 30,000. They sayit’s bad business to count chickens in the shell, but ours are tapping sohard to get out I can’t help doing it this once. I’m going to keep awayfrom the floor for an hour or so, then I will go over and wind it upand—good God, Beulah—Miss Sands—are you ill?”

The girl’s face was ashen gray and she seemed to be gasping for breath. Irushed for some water while Bob seized both her hands, but in an instantthe blood came to her cheeks with a rush and she said, “I was dizzy for amoment. It must have been the thought of taking $1,800,000 back to fatherthat upset me. With that amount father could make good all the trustfunds, and have back enough of his own fortune to make us seem, after whatwe have been going through, richer than we were before. Pardon me, Mr.Randolph, won’t you, when I say—God bless you and every one whom you holddear, God bless you? What could I or my father have done but for you andMr. Brownley?”

She turned her big eyes full upon Bob, filled with a light such as cancome only to a woman’s eyes, only to a woman before whom, as she stands onthe brink of hell, suddenly looms her heaven.

Sharp and shrill rang Bob’s Exchange telephone. The ring seemed shriller;it certainly was longer than usual. Bob jumped for the receiver.

Chapter III.

He Listened a moment, then answered, “Stand on it at 80 for 12,000 shares.I will be there in a second.” He dropped the receiver. “Jim, we havestruck a snag. Arthur Perkins, whom I left on guard at the pole, saysBarry Conant has just jumped in and supplied all the bids. He has it downto 81 and is offering it in 5,000 blocks and is aggressive. I must getthere quick,” and he shot out of the office.

I sprang for Bob’s telephone: “Perkins, quick!” “What are they doing,Perkins?” I asked a moment later.

“Conant has almost filled me up. He seems to have a hogshead of it ontap,” he answered.

“Buy 50,000 shares, 5,000 each point down; and anything unfilled, give toBob when he gets there. He is on the way.”

I shut off, and turned to Miss Sands:

“This is no time to stand on ceremony, Miss Sands. Barry Conant isCamemeyer’s and ‘Standard Oil’s’ head broker. His being on the floormeans mischief. He never goes into a big whirl personally unless they areout for blood. Bob has exhausted his buying power, and though I tell youfrankly that I never speculate, don’t believe in speculation and am inthis deal only for Bob—and for you—I swear I don’t intend to let themwipe the floor with him without at least making them swallow some of thedust they kick up. Please don’t object to my helping out, Miss Sands.Ordinarily I would defer to your wishes, but I love Bob Brownley onlysecond to my wife, and I have money enough to warrant a plunge in stock.If they should turn Bob over in this deal, he—well, they’re not going to,if I can prevent it,” and I started for the Exchange on the run.

When I got there the scene beggared description. That of the morning wastame in comparison. A bull market, however terrific, always is tame besidea bear crash. In the few moments it took me to get to the floor, thebattle had started. The greater part of the Exchange membership was in adense mob wedged against the rail behind the Sugar-pole. I could not havegot within yards of the centre of that crowd of men, fast becomingpanic-stricken, if the fate of nations had depended on my errand. I hadwitnessed such a scene before. It represented a certain phase ofStock-Exchange-gambling procedure, where one man apparently has everyother man on the floor against him. I understood: Bob against themall—he trying to stay the onrushing current of dropping prices; theybent on keeping the sluice-gates open. He was backed up againstthe rail—not the Bob of the morning; not a vestige of that cold,brain-nerve-and-body-in-hand gambler remained. His hat was gone, hiscollar torn and hanging over his shoulder. His coat and waistcoat wereripped open, showing the full length of his white shirt-front, and hiseyes were fairly mad. Bob was no longer a human being, but a monarch ofthe forest at bay, with the hunter in front of him, and closing in uponhim, in a great half-circle, the pack of harriers, all gnashing theirteeth, baring their fangs, and howling for blood. The hunter directlyfacing Bob, was Barry Conant—very slight, very short, a marvellouslycompact, handsome, miniature man, with a fascinating face, dark olive intint, lighted by a pair of sparkling black eyes and framed in jet-blackhair; a black mustache was parted over white teeth, which, when he wasstalking his game, looked like those of a wolf. An interesting man at alltimes was this Barry Conant, and he had been on more and fiercerbattle-fields than any other half-score members combined. The scene was arare one for a student of animalised men.

While every other man in the crowd was at a high tension of excitement,Barry Conant was as calm as though standing in the centre of a ten-acredaisy-field cutting off the helpless flowers’ heads with every swing ofhis arm. Switching stock-gamblers into eternity had grown to be a pastimeto Barry Conant. Here was Bob thundering with terrific emphasis “78 for5,000,” “77 for 5,000,” “75 for 5,000,” “74 for 5,000,” “73 for 5,000,”“72 for 5,000,” seemingly expecting through sheer power of voice to crushhis opponent into silence. But with the regularity of a trip-hammer BarryConant’s right hand, raised in unhurried gesture, and his clear calm“Sold” met Bob’s every retreating bid. It was a battle royal—a king onone side, a Richelieu on the other. Though there was frantic buying andselling all around these two generals, the trading was gauged by thetrend of their battle. All knew that if Bob should be beaten down by thisconcentrated modern finance devil, a panic would ensue and Sugar would gonone could say how low. But if Bob should play him to a standstill byexhausting his selling power, Sugar would quickly soar to even higherfigures than before. It was known that Barry Conant’s usual order from hisclients, the “System” masters, for such an occasion as the present was“Break the price at any cost.” On the other hand, every one knew thatRandolph & Randolph were usually behind Bob’s big operations; this wasevidently one of his biggest; and every man there knew that Randolph &Randolph were seldom backed down by any force.

As Bob made his bid “72 for 5,000,” and got it, I saw a quick flash ofpain shoot across his face, and realised that it probably meant he wasnearing the end of my last order. I sized it up that there was deviltry ofmore than usual significance behind this selling movement; that BarryConant must have unlimited orders to sell and smash. My final order offifty thousand brought our total up to one hundred and fifty thousandshares, a large amount for even Randolph & Randolph to buy of a stockselling at nearly $200 a share. I then and there decided that whateverhappened I would go no further. Just then Bob’s wild eye caught mine, andthere was in it a piteous appeal, such an appeal as one sees in the eye ofthe wounded doe when she gives up her attempt to swim to shore and waitsthe coming of the pursuing hunter’s canoe. I sadly signaled that I wasthrough. As Bob caught the sign, he threw his head back and bellowed adeep, hoarse “70 for 10,000.” I knew then that he had already bought fortythousand, and that this was the last-ditch stand. Barry Conant must havecaught the meaning too. Instantly, like a revolver report, came his“Sold!” Then the compact, miniature mass of human springs and wires, whichhad until now been held in perfect control, suddenly burst from itsclamps, and Barry Conant was the fiend his Wall Street reputation picturedhim. His five feet five inches seemed to loom to the height of a giant.His arms, with their fate-pointing fingers, rose and fell with bewilderingrapidity as his piercing voice rang out—“5,000 at 69, 68, 65,” “10,000 at63,” “25,000 at 60.” Pandemonium reigned. Every man in the crowd seemedto have the capital stock of the Sugar Trust to sell, and at any price. Ascore seemed to be bent on selling as low as possible instead of for asmuch as they could get. These were the shorts who had been punished theday before by Bob’s uplift.

Poor Bob, he was forgotten! An instant after he made his last effort hewas the dead cock in the pit. Frenzied gamblers of the Stock Exchange haveno more use for the dead cocks than have Mexicans for the real birds whenthey get the fatal gaff. The day after the contest, or even that samenight at Delmonico’s and the clubs, these men would moan for poor Bob;Barry Conant’s moan would be the loudest of them all, and, what is more,it would be sincere. But on battle day away to the dump with the fallenbird, the bird that could not win! I saw a look of deep, terrible agonyspread over Bob’s face; and then in a flash he was the Bob Brownley who Ialways boasted had the courage and the brain to do the right thing in allcircumstances. To the astonishment of every man in the crowd he let looseone wild yell, a cross between the war-whoop of an Indian and the bay of adeep-lunged hound regaining a lost scent. Then he began to throw overSugar stock, right and left, in big and little amounts. He slaughtered theprice, under-cutting Barry Conant’s every offer and filling every bid. Fortwenty minutes he was a madman, then he stopped. Sugar was falling rapidlyto the price it finally reached, 90, and the panic was in full swing, butpanics seemed now to have no interest for Bob. He pushed his way throughthe crowd and, joining me, said: “Jim, forgive me. I have dragged you intoan enormous loss, have ruined Beulah Sands, her father, and myself. Ithink at the last moment I did the only thing possible. I threw over the150,000 shares and so cut off some of our loss. Let us go to the officeand see where we stand.” He was strangely, unnaturally calm after thatheart-crushing, nerve-tearing day. I tried to tell him how I admired hiscool nerve and pluck in about-facing and doing the only thing there wasleft to do; to tell him that required more real courage andlevel-headedness than all the rest of the day’s doings; but he stopped me:

“Jim, don’t talk to me. My conceit is gone. I have learned my lessonto-day. My plans were all right, and sound, but poor fool that I was, Idid not take into consideration the loaded dice of the master thieves. Iknew what they could do, have seen them scores of times, as you have, attheir slaughter; seen them crush out the hearts of other men just as goodas you or I; seen them take them out and skin and quarter-slice them,unmindful of the agony of those who were dear to and dependent on theirowners, but it never seemed to strike me home. It was not my heart, andsomehow, I looked at it as a part of the game and let it go at that.To-day I know what it means to be put on the chopping-block of the‘System’ butchers. I know what it is to see my heart and the heart of oneI love—and yours, too, Jim—systematically skewered to those of thehundreds and thousands of victims who have gone before. Jim, we must bethree millions losers, and the men who have our money have so many, manymillions that they can’t live long enough even to thumb them over. Men whowill use our money on the gambling-table, at the race-tracks, squander iton stage harlots, or in turning their wives and daughters or theirneighbours’ wives and daughters into worse than stage harlots. Men, Jim,who are not fit, measured by any standard of decency, to walk the sameearth as you and Judge Sands. Men whose painted pets pollute the very airthat such as Beulah Sands must breathe. I’ve learned my lesson to-day. Ithought I knew the game of finance, but I’m suddenly awakened to arealisation of the dense ignorance I wallowed in. Jim, but for the loadingof the dice, I should now have been taking Beulah Sands to her father withthe money that the hellish ‘System’ stole from him. Later I should havetaken her to the altar, and after, who knows but that I should have hadthe happiest home and family in all the world, and lived as her people andmine have lived for generations, honest, God-fearing, law-abiding,neighbour-loving men and women, and then died as men should die? But now,Jim, I see a black, awful picture. No, I’m not morbid, I’m going to make aheroic effort to put the picture out of sight; but I’m afraid, Jim, I’mafraid.”

He stopped as we pulled up on the sidewalk in front of Randolph &Randolph’s office. “Here it is on the bulletin. See what did the trick,Jim. They held the Sugar meeting last night instead of waiting tillto-morrow, and cut the dividend instead of increasing it. The world won’tknow it until to-morrow. Then they will know it, then they will know it.They will read it in the headlines of the papers—a few suicides, a fewdefaulters, a few new convicts, an unclaimed corpse or two at the morgue;a few innocent girls, whose fathers’ fortunes have gone to swellCamemeyer’s and ‘Standard Oil’s’ already uncountable gold, turned intostreetwalkers; a few new palaces on Fifth Avenue, and a few new librariesgiven to communities that formerly took pride in building them from theirhonestly earned savings. A report or two of record-breaking diamond salesby Tiffany to the kings and czars of dollar royalty, then front-page newsstories of clawing, mauling, and hair-pulling wrangles among the stageharlots for the possession of these diamonds. They were not quite surethat the dividend cut alone would do the trick, and they were taking nochances, these mighty warriors of the ‘System,’ so their hireling Senatecommittee held a session last night and unanimously reported to put sugaron the free list. The people will read that in the morning, and probablythe day after they’ll be told that the committee held another sessionto-night and unanimously reported to take it off the free list. By thattime these honourable statesmen will have loaded up with the stock thatyou and I and Beulah Sands sold, and that other poor devils will slaughterto-morrow after reading their morning papers.”

Bob’s bitterness was terrible. My heart was torn as I listened. He stalkedthrough the office and into that of Beulah Sands. I followed. She was ather desk, and when she looked up, her great eyes opened in wonderment asthey took in Bob, his grim, set face, the defiant, sullen desperation ofthe big brown eyes, the dishevelled hair and clothes. For an instant shestood as one who had seen an apparition.

“Look me over, Beulah Sands,” he said, “look me over to your heart’scontent, for you may never again see the fool of fools in all the world,the fool who thought himself competent to cope with men of brains, withmen who really know how to play the game of dollars as it is played inthis Christian age. Don’t ask me not to call you Beulah; that what I triedto do was for you is the one streak of light in all this black hell.Beulah, Beulah, we are ruined, you, your father, and I, ruined, and I’mthe fool who did it.”

She rose from her desk with all the quiet, calm dignity that we had beenadmiring for three months, and stood facing Bob. She did not seem to seeme; she saw nothing but the man who had gone out that morning thepersonification of hope, who now stood before her the picture of blackdespair, and she must have thought, “It was all for me.” Suddenly she tookthe lapels of his torn coat in either hand. She had to reach up to do it,this winsome little Virginia lady. With her big calm blue eyes lookingstraight into his, she said:

“Bob.”

That was all, but the word seemed to change the very atmosphere in theroom. The look of desperation faded from Bob’s face, and as though thewords had sprung the hidden catch to the doors of his storehouse ofpent-up misery, his eyes filled with hot, blinding tears. His great chestwas convulsed with sobs. Again—clear, calm, fearless, and tender, camethe one syllable, “Bob.” And at that Bob’s self-control slipped theleash. With a hoarse cry, he threw his arms around her and crushed her tohis breast. The sacredness of the scene made me feel like an intruder, andI started to leave the room. But in a moment Beulah Sands was her usualself and, turning to me, she said: “Mr. Randolph, please forget what youhave seen. For an instant, as I saw Mr. Brownley’s awful misery, I thoughtof nothing but what he had done for me, what he had tried to do for myfather, what a penalty he has paid. From what you said when you left andthe fact that I got no word from either of you, I feared the worst and didnot dare look at the tape; I simply waited and hoped and—prayed. Yes, Iprayed as my mother taught me I should pray whenever I was helpless andcould do nothing myself. And I felt that God would not let the noble workof two such men be overthrown by those you were battling with. In themidst of a calmness that I took for a good omen, you came. Can you blameme for forgetting myself? Mr. Brownley,” the voice was now calm andself-controlled, “tell me what you have done. Where do we stand?” “Thereis little to tell,” Bob answered. “Camemeyer and ‘Standard Oil’ havetaken me into camp as they would take a stuck pig. They have made amonkeyfied ass out of me, and we are ruined, and I have caused Mr.Randolph a heavy loss. Roughly, I figure that of your four hundredthousand capital and the million four hundred thousand profit you had thismorning, only your capital remains.”

Wishing to spare Bob, I interrupted and myself gave the girl briefly thedetails of what had happened. She listened intently and seemed to take inall the trickery of the “System” masters; seemed to see just what it meantto us and to her. But she made no comment, showed by no outward sign thatshe suffered. As soon as I was through she turned to Bob, who had stoodwith his eyes fastened upon her face, as though somewhere out of its softbeauty must come an assurance that this was all a bad dream.

“Mr. Brownley,” she said, “let us figure up just where we stand, so thatwe may know what to do to recoup. You have said so many times, since Ihave been here, that Wall Street is magic land; that no man may telltwenty-four hours ahead what will happen to him. You have said it so manytimes that I believe it. We know that this morning we were at the goal,that we were millions ahead, and all from twenty-four hours’ effort. Wehave yet almost three months left, and I do not see why we have not justas much chance as we had day before yesterday. Yes, and more, because weknow more now. Next time we will include the dividend cuts and the Senateduplicity in our figuring.”

We both dumbly stared in wondering admiration at this marvellous woman.Was it possible that a girl could have such nerve, such courage? Or hadwoman’s hope, so persistent where her loved ones are concerned, madeBeulah Sands blind to the awfulness of the situation? As I looked at her Icould not doubt that she fully realised our position, that she was reallysuffering more than either of us, that she was only acting to ease Bob’sanguish. Bob brought out his memoranda, and in half an hour we had thefigures. The total loss was nearly three millions. As Beulah Sands’s20,000 shares had cost less than ours and Bob figured to leave her capitalof $400,000 intact, we felt some comfort. Beulah Sands had watched thefiguring with the keenness of an expert, and when Bob announced the finalfigures, which showed that she still had what she started with, she drewthe sheet containing the totals to her. “I was willing to accept yourassistance,” she said, “when the deal promised a profit to all of us,because I appreciated your goodness and knew how much it would hurt yourfeelings if I were churlish about the division; but now that we all lose Imust stand my fair share; I must.” She said this in a way that we bothknew precluded the possibility of argument. “We owned together 150,000shares. I was to have had the profits on 20,000 shares. Our total loss is$2,775,000, of which I must bear my just proportion. Mr. Brownley, youwill see that $370,000 is charged to my account. I shall have $30,000left. If our cause is as just as we think, God in his goodness will makethis ample for our purposes.”

Though Bob and I were in despair at her determination to strip herself ofwhat Bob had worked so hard to accumulate, we could not help feeling areverence for her faith and her sturdy independence. She now showed us inher delicate way that she wished to be alone; as we went she held out herhand to Bob. “Mr. Brownley, please, for the sake of the work we have todo, look on the bright side of this calamity, for it has a bright side.You wanted me to send word to my father that we were about to graspvictory. Think if we had sent it—then you will know that God is good,even when we think he is chastening us beyond endurance.”

Bob took me into his office. “Jim, you see what a woman can do, and we aretaught women are the weaker sex. Now listen to what you must do. Accept mynotes for the whole loss, less one hundred thousand which I have to mycredit, and which I will pay on account. I won’t listen to any objection.The deal was mine; you came in only to help us out, and I ought never tohave tempted you. If I remain in my present busted condition, the noteswill be blank paper. Therefore you do me no harm in taking them. If Ishould strike it rich, I should never feel like a man until I made up theloss.”

It was no use arguing with him in his inflexible mood, so I took hisdemand notes for $2,405,000. I begged him to go home with me to dinner,but he insisted that he could not face my wife with his last night’sbreak still fresh in her mind. Next day he did not turn up. Along in theafternoon I received a telegram from him, saying that he was on his way toVirginia, that he needed a rest and would be back in a week. I wasworried, nervous. It takes until the next day and the day after, and theweek after that, to get down to the deepest misery of an upset such as wehad been through. I did not feel easy with Bob out of sight while he wassounding for a new footing. I went to Beulah Sands in hope we might talkover the affair, but when I told her that Bob was to be gone for a weekand that I was uneasy, she said in her calm, confident manner: “I don’tthink there is anything to worry about, Mr. Randolph. Mr. Brownley is toomuch of a man to allow an affair of dollars to do anything more than annoyhim. He will be back all the better for his rest.” She dropped her longlashes in a this-conversation-is-closed way that we had come to know meantgoing time.

Chapter IV.

The following week Bob returned to the office. He had not changed, and yethe had changed greatly. Rest had apparently done much for him. His colourwas good, his step elastic as of old, and his head was thrown back as ifhe were buckled up for the fray and wanted all to know it. Yet there wassomething in the eye, in the setness of the jaw, in the hair-trigger calm,yet fiercely savage grip in which he closed his strong hands on the armsof his chair, that told me more plainly than words that this was not theoptimistic, soft-hearted Bob Brownley I had known and loved. I could nothelp feeling that if I had been a leader of the Russian terrorists, andthis man who now sat before me had come to my ken when I was selectingbomb-throwers, I should have seized upon him of all men as the one tostalk the Czar or his marked minions. Surely the iron that had enteredBob’s soul a week before had affected his whole being. I think BeulahSands had some such thoughts. For I saw a shadow of perplexity cross herbroad, low forehead after her first meeting with him, a shadow that hadnot been there before.

For days after Bob’s return I saw little of him. I think Beulah Sands sawless. During Stock Exchange hours he spent most of his time on the floor,but he executed few of our orders. He merely looked them over and handedthem out to his assistants. As far as I could learn, he spent much of histime there yesterdaying through hope’s graveyards, a not uncommon pastimefor active Exchange members whose first through specials have beenopen-switched by the “System” towerman. So strong had become this habit ofgoing about from pole to pole with bent head and a far-off gaze that hisfellow members began to humour and respect it. They all knew that Bob hadgone up against the Sugar panic hard. No one knew how hard, but allguessed from his changed appearance and habits that it must have been abone-smashing blow. Nothing so quickly and so deeply stirs a StockExchange man’s feelings for his brother member as to know that “They” haveditched his El Dorado flyer—that is, if he has been a good the booksshowed no change in Beulah Sands’s account. There was the poor little$30,000 balance; no other entries. One afternoon Beulah Sands had askedfor a meeting between Bob and myself in her office. She could hardly haveasked Bob to come without me, but I knew it was Bob she wanted to see, andI felt that the best thing I could do for them was to leave them alone. SoI made some excuse for a moment’s delay at my desk, telling Bob to go oninto her office, and promising to follow shortly. He went in, leaving thedoor partly open. I think that from the moment he entered the room both ofthem utterly forgot my existence. From her desk Beulah could not see me,and Bob sat so that his back was half toward me. “I dislike to trouble youabout my account,” I heard her begin in a voice a trifle uneven, “but as Imust go back to Father Christmas week, I wanted to get your advice as tothe advisability of writing him that, though there is still a chance fordoing wonders, I do not think we shall be able to save him. Of course Iwon’t put it in just that blunt way, but it seems to me I should begin toprepare him for the blow. I have not talked over any more plunging withyou, Mr. Brownley, since the unlucky one in Sugar, and——”

“Miss Sands, I understand what you mean,” Bob broke in, “and I shouldapologise for not having consulted with you about your business affairs.The fact is, I have not been quite clear as to the best thing to do. Ihope you don’t think I have forgotten. Never for a moment since I tookcharge of your affairs have I forgotten my promise to see that they werekept active. Truly I have been trying to think out some successful plunge,but—but”—there was a hoarseness in his voice—“I have not had my oldconfidence in myself since that day in Sugar when I killed your hopes anddestroyed the chance of saving your father—no, I have not had thatconfidence a man must have in himself to win at this game.”

There was a silence, and then I heard an indescribable fluttering rushthat told as plainly as sight could have done that a woman had answeredher heart’s call. Looking up involuntarily, I saw a sight that for a longmoment held my eyes as if I had been fascinated. It was Bob bowed forwardwith his face hidden in his hands and beside him, on her knees, BeulahSands, her arms about his neck, his head drawn down to her bosom. “Bob,Bob,” she said chokingly, “I cannot stand it any longer. My heart isbreaking for you. You were so happy when I came into your life, and thehappiness is changed to misery and despair, and all for me, a stranger. Atfirst I thought of nothing but father and how to save him, but since thatday when those men struck at your heart, I have been filled with, oh! sucha longing to tell you, to tell you, Bob——”

“What? Beulah, what? For the love of God, don’t stop; tell me, Beulah,tell me.” He had not lifted his head. It was buried on her breast, hisarms closed around her. She bent her head and laid her beautiful, softcheek, down which the tears were now streaming, against his brown hair.“Bob, forgive me, but I love you, love you, Bob, as only a woman can lovewho has never known love before, never known anything but stern duty. Bob,night after night when all have left I have crept into your office and satin your chair. I have laid my head on your desk and cried and cried untilit seemed as though I could not live till morning without hearing you saythat you loved me, and that you did not mind the ruin I had brought intoyour life. I have patted the back of your chair where your dear head hadrested. I have covered the arms of your chair, that your strong, bravehands had gripped, with kisses. Night after night I have knelt at yourdesk and prayed to God to shield you, to protect you from all harm, tobrush away the black cloud I brought into your life. I have asked Him todo with me, yes, with my father and mother, anything, anything if only Hewould bring back to you the happiness I had stolen. Bob, I have suffered,suffered, as only a woman can suffer.”

She was sobbing as though her heart would break, sobbing wildly,convulsively, like the little child who in the night comes to its mother’sbed to tell of the black goblins that have been pursuing it. Long beforeshe had finished speaking—and it took only a few heart-beats for thatrush of words—I had broken the power of the fascination that held me, hadturned away my eyes, and tried not to listen. For fear of breaking thespell, I did not dare cross the room to close Beulah’s door or to reachthe outer door of my office, which was nearer hers than it was to my desk.I waited—through a silence, broken only by Beulah’s weeping, that seemedhour-long. Then in Bob’s voice came one low sob of joy:

“Beulah, Beulah, my Beulah!”

I realised that he had risen. I rose too, thinking that now I could closethe door. But again I saw a picture that transfixed me. Bob had takenBeulah by both shoulders and he held her off and looked into her eyes longand beseechingly. Never before nor since have I seen upon human face thatglorious joy which the old masters sought to get into the faces of theirworshippers who, kneeling before Christ, tried to send to Him, throughtheir eyes, their soul’s gratitude and love. I stood as one enthralled.Slowly and as reverently as the living lover touches the brow of his deadwife, Bob bent his head and kissed her forehead. Again and again he drewher to him and implanted upon her brow and eyes and lips his kisses. Icould not stand the scene any longer. I started to the corridor-door, andthen, as though for the first time either had known I was within hearing,they turned and stared at me. At last Bob gave a long deep sigh, then oneof those reluctant laughs of happiness yet wet with sobs.

“Well, Jim, dear old Jim, where did you come from? Like alleavesdroppers, you have heard no good of yourself. Own up, Jim, you didnot hear a word good or bad about yourself, for it is just coming back tome that we have been selfish, that we have left you entirely out of ourbusiness conference.”

We all laughed, and Beulah Sands, with her face a bloom of burningblushes, said: “Mr. Randolph, we have not settled what it is best to doabout father’s affairs.”

After a little we did begin to talk business, and finally agreed thatBeulah should write her father, wording her letter as carefully aspossible, to avoid all direct statements, but showing him that she hadmade but little headway on the work she had come North to accomplish. Bobwas a changed being now; so, too, was Beulah Sands. Both discussed theirhopes and fears with a frankness in strange contrast to their formermanner. But there was one point on which Bob showed he was holding back. Ifinally put it to him bluntly: “Bob, are you working out anything thatlooks like real relief for Miss Sands and her father?”

“I don’t know how to answer you, Jim. I can only say I have some ideas,radical ones perhaps, but—well, I am thinking along certain lines.”

I saw he was not yet willing to take us into his confidence. We parted,Bob going along in the cab with Miss Sands.

Two days afterward she sent for us both as soon as we got to the office.

“I have this telegram from father—it makes me uneasy: ‘Mailed to-dayimportant letter. Answer as soon as you receive.’”

The following afternoon the letter came. It showed Judge Sands in a verynervous, uneasy state. He said he had been living a life of daily terror,as some of his friends, for whose estates he was trustee, had beenreceiving anonymous letters, advising them to look into the judge’s trustaffairs; that the Reinhart crowd had been using renewed pressure to makehim let go all his Seaboard stock, which they wanted to secure at the lowprices to which they had depressed it, in order that they might reorganiseand carry out the scheme they had been so long planning. Judge Sands wenton to say that the day he was compelled to sell his Seaboard stock hewould have to make public an announcement of his condition, as therecould be no sale without the court’s consent. His closing was:

“My dear daughter, no one knows better than I the almost hopelessness of expecting any relief from your operations. But so hopeless have I become of late, so much am I reliant upon you, my dear child, and eternal hope so springs in all of us when confronted with great necessities, that I have hoped and still hope that you are to be the saviour of your family; that you, only a frail child, are through God’s marvellous workings to be the one to save the honour of that name we both love more than life; the one to keep the wolf of poverty from that door through which so far has come nothing but the sunshine of prosperity and happiness; the one, my dear Beulah, who is to save your old father from a dishonoured grave. Dear child, forgive me for placing upon your weak shoulders the additional burden of knowing I am now helpless and compelled to rely absolutely upon you. After you have read my letter, if there is no hope, I command you to tell me so at once, for although I am now financially and almost mentally helpless, I am still a Sands, and there has never yet been one of the name who shirked his duty, however stern and painful it might be.”

When I handed the letter back to Miss Sands, she said:

“Mr. Randolph, let me tell you and Mr. Brownley a little about my fatherand our home, that you may see our situation as it is. My father is one ofthe noblest men that ever lived. I am not the only one who says that—ifyou were to ask the people of our State to name the one man who had donemost for the State as a State, most for her progressive betterment, mostfor her people high and low, white and black, they would answer, ‘JudgeLee Sands.’ He has been, and is, the idol of our people. After he wasgraduated from Harvard, he entered the law office of my grandfather,Senator Robert Lee Sands. Before he was thirty he was in Congress and waseven then reputed the greatest orator of our State, where orators are soplentiful. He married my mother, his second cousin, Julia Lee, ofRichmond, at twenty-five, and from then until the attack of that ruthlessmoney-shark, led a life such as a true man would map out for himself ifhis Maker granted him the privilege. You would have to visit at our hometo appreciate my father’s character and to understand how terrible thissorrow is to him. Every morning of his life he spends an hour afterbreakfast with my dear mother, who is a cripple from hip disease. He takesher in his arms and brings her down from her room to the library as if shewere a child. He then reads to her—and he knows good books as well as heknows his friends. After he takes mother back to her room, he gives anhour to our people, the blacks of the plantation and his white tenantsthroughout the county. He is a father to them all. He settles all theirtroubles, big and little. Then for hours he and I go over his businessaffairs. Every afternoon from four to five he devotes to his estates andthe men and women for whom he acts as trustee. He has often said to me:‘We have a clear million of money and property, and that is all any manshould have in America. It is all he is entitled to under our form ofgovernment. Any more than that an honest man should in one way or anotherreturn to the people from whom he has taken it. I never want my family tohave more than a million dollars.’ When he went into the Seaboard affair,he explained to me that it was to assist the Wilsons—they were oldfriends, and he has acted as their solicitor for years—in building up theSouth. He discussed with me the right and advisability of putting in thetrust funds. He said he considered it his duty to employ them as he didhis own in enterprises that would aid the whole people of the South,instead of sending them to the North to be used in Wall Street as beltingfor the ‘System’ grinder. These fortunes were made in the South by men wholoved their section of the country more than they did wealth, and whyshould they not be employed to benefit that part of the country whichtheir makers and owners loved? I remember vividly how perplexed he waswhen, at the beginning, the Wilsons would show him that the investmentswere returning unusually large profits.

“‘It is not right, Beulah,’ he said to me one morning after receiving aletter from Baltimore to the effect that Seaboard stock and bonds hadadvanced until his investment showed over fifty per cent, profit, ‘it isnot right for us to make this money. No man in America should make overlegal rates of interest and a fair profit on an investment, that is, aninvestment of capital pure and simple, particularly in a transportationcompany, where every dollar of profit comes from the people who patronisethe lines. I have worked it out on every side, and it is not right; itwould not be legal if the people, who make the laws for their ownbetterment, understood their affairs as they should.’

“He was always writing to the Wilsons to conduct the affairs of theSeaboard so that there would be remaining each year only profits enoughto keep the road up and the wharves in good condition and to pay theannual interest and a fair dividend. And when the Wilsons came to ourhouse to lay before him the offer of Reinhart and his fellow plunderers topay enormous profits for the control of the Seaboard, he was indignant andargued with them that the offer was an insult to honest men. It was he whoadvised the trusteeship control of the Seaboard stock to prevent Reinhartfrom securing control. I sat in the library when he talked to the elderWilson and the directors.

“He appealed directly to John Wilson to make an effort to stop the growingtendency to use the people as pawns to enslave themselves and theirchildren. He said some man of undoubted probity, standing, and wealth,someone whom the people trusted, must start the fight against these NewYork fiends, whose only thought is to roll up wealth. And he told JohnWilson he was the man, since he had great wealth, honestly got by hisfather and grandfather; no one would accuse him of being a hypocrite,seeking notoriety, and his standing in the financial world was so old andsolid that it would have to listen to him. I remember-how emphaticallyfather said: ‘I tell you, John,even the discussion of such aproposition as that scoundrel Reinhart makes is degrading to an American’shonour.’ He said it didn’t make the least difference if Reinhart countedhis millions by the score, and was director in thirty or forty greatinstitutions, and gave a fortune every year for charity and to thechurch—that he was a blackleg just the same. And so is any man, he said,who dares to say he will take the stock of a transportation company, whichrepresents a certain amount of money invested, and double or multiply itby five and ten, simply because he can compel the people to pay exorbitantfares and freight-rates and so get profits on this fraudulently increasedcapital.

“It was the decision arrived at by father and the Wilsons at this meeting,a decision to refuse in any circumstances to allow our Southern people tobe bled by the Wall Street ‘System,’ that started Reinhart and hisdollar-fiends on the war-path. You can see from what I tell you of myfather the terrible condition he is in now. At night, when I get tothinking of him, hoping against hope, with no one to help him, no one withwhom he can talk over his affairs, when I think of his nobleness indevoting his time to mother and by sheer will-power concealing from herhis awful suffering, it nearly drives me mad.”

“Miss Sands, why will you not let me lend you the money necessary to tideyour father over for a while?” I asked.

“You are so good, Mr. Randolph, but you don’t quite understand my fatherin spite of what I have said. He would not relieve his suffering at theexpense of another, not if it were a hundred times more acute. You cannotunderstand the old-fashioned, deep-rooted pride of the Sands.”

“But can you not, at least temporarily, disguise from him just how youhave arranged the relief?”

Her big blue eyes stared at me in bewilderment.

“Mr. Randolph, I could not deceive father. I could not tell him a lie evento save his life. It would be impossible. My father abhors a lie. Hebelieves a man or woman who would lie the lowest of the low things onearth. When I go back to my father he will say, ‘Tell me what you havedone.’ I can just see him now, standing between the big white pillars atthe end of the driveway. I can hear him say calmly, ‘Beulah, my daughter,welcome. Your mother is waiting for you in her room. Do not lose a momentgetting to her.’ Afterward he’ll take me over the plantation to show meall the familiar things, and not one word will he allow me to say aboutour affairs until dinner is over, until the neighbours have left, for noSands returns from long absence without a fitting home welcome. When Ihave said good night to mother and sister and he has drawn up my rocker infront of his big chair in the library alcove and I’ve lighted his cigarfor him, he will look me in the eye and say, ‘Daughter, tell me all youhave done.’ I would no more think of holding anything back than I would ofstabbing him to the heart. No, Mr. Randolph, there is no possibility ofrelief except in fairly using that $30,000, and fairly winning back whatWall Street has stolen from father. Even that will cause both of us manytwinges of conscience, and anything more is impossible. If this cannot bedone, father must, all of us must, pay the penalty of Reinhart’s ruthlessact.”

Bob had listened, but made no comment until she was through; then he said,“It looks to me as though the market is shaping up so that we may be ableto do something soon.” It was evident to both of us that he had some planin mind.

Later we learned that that night Beulah wrote her father a long letter,telling him what she had done; that she had made almost two millionsprofit from her operations, that they had been lost, and that the outlookwas not reassuring. She begged him to prepare himself for the finalcalamity; promising that if there were no change for the better byDecember 1st, she would come home to be with him when the blow fell. Shebegged him to prepare to meet it like a Sands, and assured him that ifworse came to worst she would earn enough to keep poverty away. JudgeSands would receive this letter the second day following, Friday, the 13thday of November. My God! how well I know the date. It is seared into mybrain as though with a white-hot iron.

After our talk with Beulah Sands I begged Bob to dine with me and go overmatters at length to see if we could not find a way out to relief.

“No, Jim, I have work to do to-night, worn that won’t wait. That TariffBill was buttoned up to-day, and it has just been announced that theSugar directors have declared a big extra stock dividend. Things have comeout just about as I told you they would, and the stock is climbing to-day.They say it will touch 200 to-morrow and ‘the Street’ is predicting 250for it in ten days. Barry Conant has been a steady buyer all day and thenews bureaus announced that Camemeyer and the ‘Standard Oil’ are twentymillions winners. They say the Washington gamblers, the Congressmen,Senators, and Cabinet members with their heelers and lobbyists have made akilling. About every one seems to have fattened up, Jim, but you and meand Beulah Sands and the public. The public gets the axe both ways asusual. They have been shaken out of their stock, and they will becompelled to pay millions more each year for their sugar than they wouldif this law had not been made for their benefit. Jim, there is nodisguising the fact that the American people are as helpless in the handsof these thugs of the ‘System’ as though they lived in the realm of theSultan, where a few cutthroat brigands are licensed to rob and oppress totheir heart’s content. Jim Randolph, you know this game of finance. Youknow how it is worked and the men who work it. Tell me if there is anyconsideration due Wall Street and its heart-and-soul butchers at the handsof honest men.”

“I don’t know what you mean, Bob. What are you driving at?”

“Never mind what I am driving at. I ask you whether, if an honest man knewhow to beat Wall Street at its own game, he should hesitate to beatit—hesitate because of anything connected with conscience or morals? Yousaw what Barry Conant was able to do to us that day simply by standing onthe floor of the Stock Exchange and outstaying me in opening and closinghis mouth. You saw he was able to sell Sugar to a point so low that I wasobliged to let go of our 150,000 shares at eight to ten million dollarsless than we could have got for them if we could have held them untilto-day. Because of this trick his clients, the ‘System,’ instead of us,make five to seven millions.”

“I don’t follow you, Bob. I know that Barry Conant was able to do thisbecause he had more money behind him than you.”

“You think so, do you, Jim? That is the way it looks to you, but I tellyou money had nothing to do with it. Nothing had to do with it but thefiendish system of fraud and trickery upon which the whole stock-gamblingstructure is reared. Nothing entered into the whole business but thetrickery of stock-gambling as conducted to-day. It was only a question,Jim, of a man’s opening and closing his mouth and spitting out words. Fromthe minute Barry Conant came into that crowd until he left and we wereruined, he showed no money, no anything that I did not show. From the verynature of the business he could not. He simply said ‘Sold’ oftener andlonger than I said ‘Buy.’ He may have had money back of him, or he mayonly have had nerve. God Almighty is the only one who can tell, for whenConant was through he was able to buy back at 90 the 50,000 shares he soldme at 175, the 50,000 that broke my back. Jim, if I had known as much thatday as I do now I would have stood in that crowd and bought all the stockhe sold at 180 and I would have stood there buying until hell froze overor he quit; then I would have made him rebuy it at 280 or 2,080, and Iwould have broken him and all his Camemeyer and ‘Standard Oil’ backers;broken them to their last crime-covered dollar.”

“Bob, what are you talking about? It is all Chinese to me. I cannot gethead or tail of what you are driving at.”

“I know you can’t, Jim, neither could Wall Street if it were listening tome. But you will, and Wall Street will too, before many days go by. Now Imust be off. I have work to do.”

He put on his hat and left me trying to puzzle out just what he meant.

Next day the Sugar bulls had the centre of the Stock Exchange stage. Allday long they tossed Sugar from one to another as though each thousandshares had been a wisp of hay instead of $200,000—for soon after theopening it soared to 200. The “System’s” cohorts were in absolute control,with Barry Conant never a minute away from the Sugar-pole, always on thealert to steer the course of prices when they threatened to run away onthe up or the down side. It was evident to the expert readers of the tapethat the “System” was currying its steed for an exceptionally brilliantrun. Ike Bloomstein, the Average Fiend, who for forty years had kept closetrack of every movement on the floor, and who would bet anything, from hisFifth Avenue mansion to his overripe boardroom straw hat, that all stocksand movements were as strictly subject to the law of averages as are thetides to the moon and sun, remarked to Joe Barnes, the loan expert:

“‘Cam’ unt de Keroseners are pudding up egstra dop rails to dot wool-pendeh haf ben pilding since deh took Pop Prownlee and deh Rantolphs intogamp. Unless my topesheet goes pack on me, for deh first dime in fortyyears dere vill pe a record clip pefore a veek from to-tay.”

“I am with you there, Ike,” answered Joe. “If Barry Conant’s knife-edgedteeth ever spelt a killin’, they do to-day. I just got orders fromsomewhere to drop call money from four to two and a half per cent., andthey have given me ten millions to drop it with and the order is to favourSugar as ‘collat.’ Some one is anxious to make it easy for the bleaters toget the coin to buy all the Sugar they want. Ike, you and I might maketurkey money for Thanksgiving if we only knew whether Barry and his bunchwere going to shoot her up thirty or forty points before they turned thebag upside down, or whether they will bury them from 200 to 150. What doyou think?”

“I gant make out, aldo I haf vatched dem sharp all day. Dey certainly hafdeh lambs lined up right now for any vey dey vont to twist id. I nefer seea petter market for a deluge. From Barry’s movements all day I should saydey vould keep hoistin’ her until apout noon to-morrow, unt dat deh mightget her up to two-tirty or even to deh two-fifty. Put dere are von or twotopes on deh sheet vhat run deh uder vay. First der is dey fact you gantrun out, dat dere is alreaty on deh Sugar vagon deh piggest load of chuicysuckers dat efer game in from deh suppurbs. Sharley Pates says if any vonhat tapped his Vashington vire er any utter Capitol vire dis veek he vouldhaf tought dere vas a Senate, House, unt Kabinet roll-gall on. Deh topessay ‘Cam’ vill nefer led dat fat punch off grafters slite out mit realmoney if he gan help id unt deh game iss endirely in his hands.”

“I agree with you, Ike. If I had the steering of this killing I don’tthink I would take any chance of tempting them to dump and grab theprofits by carrying it much over 200. But you can’t tell what ‘Cam’ andthose four-eyed dentists at 26 Broadway will do.”

“Yes, put der iss anudder t’ing, Cho, dat makes me sit up unt plink abouther goin’ ofer two hundred. To-morrow’s Friday der t’irteenth.”

“Of course, Ike, that is something to be reckoned with, and every man onthe floor and in the Street as well has his eye on it. Friday, the 13th,would break the best bull market ever under way. You and I know that, Ike,and the dope shows it too, but you have got to stack this up against it onthis trip: no man on the floor knows what Friday the 13th, means betterthan Barry Conant. He has worked it to the queen’s taste many a time. Why,Barry would not eat to-day for fear the food would get stuck in hiswindpipe. He’s never left the pole for a minute; but suppose, Ike, Barryhas tipped off ‘Cam’ that all the boys will let go their fliers, and mostof them will take one on the short side over to-night for a superstitiondrop at the opening; and suppose ‘Cam’ has told him to take them all intocamp and give her a rafter-scraper at the opening, where would old Friday,13th, land on to-morrow’s dope-sheets? Bring up the average, wouldn’t it,for five years to come? I tell you, Ike, she’s too deep for me this run,and I’m goin’ to let her alone and pay for the turkey out of loancommissions or stick to plain workday food.”

“Zame here, Cho. Say, Cho, haf you noticed Pop Prownlee to-tay? He hasfrozen to deh fringe off dat Sugar crowd ess t’ough some von hat nipped‘is scarf-pin unt he vos layin’ for him ass he game out. He hasn’t made atrade to-tay unt yet he sticks like a stamp-tax. I ben keeping my eyes onhim for I t’ought he hat someding up his sleeve dat might raise tust venhe tropt id. I dink Parry has hat deh same itear. He never loses sight ofhim, yet Pop hasn’t made a trade to-tay, unt here id iss twenty minutes ofder glose unt dere iss Parry in deh centre again whooping her up ofer twohundred unt four.”

Chapter V.

Thursday, November 12th, was a memorable day in Wall Street. As the gongpealed its the-game’s-closed-till-another-day, the myriad of torturedsouls that are supposed to haunt the treacherous bogs and quicksands ofthe great Exchange, where lie their earthly hopes, must have prayed withrenewed earnestness for its destruction before the morrow. Never had theStock Exchange folded its tents with surer confidence of continuing itsvictorious march. Sugar advanced with record-breaking total sales to207½ and in the final half-hour carried the whole list of stocks upwith it. In that time some of the railroads jumped ten points. Sugarclosed at the very top amid great excitement, with Barry Conant taking alloffered. During the last thirty minutes it had become evident to all thatthe boardroom traders and plungers, together with many of thesemi-professional gamblers, who operated through commission houses, wereselling out their long stock and going short over the opening of the WallStreet hoodoo-day, Friday, the thirteenth of the month. But it was alsoevident, with the heavy selling at the close and the stiffness of theprice, which had never wavered as block after block was thrown on themarket, that some powerful interest as well had taken cognisance of thefact that the morrow was hoodoo-day. At the close, most of the sellers,had they been granted another five minutes, would have repurchased, evenat a loss, what they had sold, for it looked as though they had soldthemselves into a trap. Their anxiety was intensified by the publication,a few minutes later, of this item:

“Barry Conant in coming from the Sugar crowd after the close remarked to a fellow broker, ‘By three o’clock to-morrow, Friday, the 13th, will have a new meaning to Wall Street.’ This was interpreted as pointing to a terrific jump in Sugar to-morrow.”

“The Street” knew that the news bureau that sent out this item wasfriendly to Barry Conant and the “System,” and that it would print nothingdispleasing to them. Therefore, this must be, a foreword of the comingharvest of the bulls and the slaughter of the bears.

Others than Ike Bloomstein remarked upon the fact that Bob Brownley hadhung close to the Sugar-pole all day, but when the close had come and gonewithout his having anything to do with the Sugar skyrockets, he droppedout of his fellow-brokers’ minds. Wall Street has no use for any but the“doer.” The poet and the mooner would be no more secure from interruptionin the centre of the Sahara than in Wall Street between ten and threeo’clock. Some sage has said that the human mind, like the well-bucket, cancarry only its fill. The Wall Street mind always has its fill of buddingdollars. In consequence, there is never room for those other intereststhat enter the normal mind.

Friday, the 13th of November, drifted over Manhattan Island in a dreardrizzle of marrow-chilling haze, which just missed being rain—one ofthose New York days that give a hesitating suicide renewed courage to cutthe mortal coil. By ten o’clock it had settled down on the Stock Exchangeand its surrounding infernos with a clamminess that damped the spirits ofthe most rampant bulls. No class in the world is so susceptible toatmospheric conditions as stock-gamblers. Many a stout-hearted one hasbeen known to postpone the inauguration of a long-planned coup merelybecause the air filled his blood with the dank chill of superstition.Because of the expected Sugar pyrotechnics, Stock Exchange members hadgathered early; the brokers’ offices were crowded to overflowing beforeten; the morning papers, not only in New York but in Boston, Philadelphia,and other centres, were filled with stories of the big rise that was totake place in Sugar. The knowing ones saw the ear-marks of the “System’s”press-agent in these stories; and they knew that this industriousinstitution had not sat up the night before because of insomnia. All thesigns pointed to a killing, and a terrific one—pointed so plainly thatthe bears and Sugar shorts found no hope in the atmosphere or the date.

Bob had not been near the office the afternoon before, and as he had notcome in by five minutes to ten I decided to go over to the Exchange andsee if he were going to mix up in the baiting of the Sugar bears. I had nospecific reasons for thinking he was interested except his recent queeractions, particularly his hanging to the Sugar-pole, yet doing nothing,the day before. But it is one of the best-established traditions ofstock-gambledom that when an operator has been bitten by a rabidstock he is invariably attracted to it every time afterward that itshows signs of frothing. More than all, I had one of those strongnowhere-born-nowhere-cradled intuitions common to those living in thestock-gambling world, which made me feel the creepy shadow of comingevents.

As on that day a few weeks before, the crowd was at the Sugar-pole, butits alignment was different. There in the centre were Barry Conant and histrusted lieutenants, but no opposing rival. None of those hundreds ofbrokers showed that desperate resolve to do or die that is born of anecessity. They were there to buy or sell, but not to put up a life ordeath, on-me-depends-the-result fight. Those who were long of stock couldeasily be distinguished by their expressions of joy from the shorts, whohad seen the handwriting on the wall and were filled with uncertainty,fear, terror. The demeanour of Barry Conant and his lieutenants expressedconfidence: they were going to do what they were there to do. They showedby their tight-buttoned coats, and squared shoulders that they expectedlots of rush, push, and haul work, but apparently they anticipated nolast-ditch fighting. The gong pealed and the crowd of brokers sprang atone another, but only for blood, not flesh, bone, heart, and soul; justblood. The first price on Sugar was 211 for 3,000 shares. Someone sold itin a block. Barry Conant bought it. It did not require three eyes to seethat the seller was one of his lieutenants. This meant what is known as a“wash” sale, a fictitious one arranged in advance between two brokers toestablish the basis for the trades that are to follow—one of those minorfrauds of stock-gambling by which the public is deceived and the tradersand plungers are handicapped with loaded dice. In principle, it is adevice older than stock exchanges themselves, and is put to use elsewherethan on the floor. For instance, four genuine buyers want a particularanimal worth $200 at a horse auction. Its owner’s pal starts the biddingat $400, and the four, not being up in horse values, are thereby inducedto reach for it at between $400 to $500. But human nature, whether athorse sales or at stock-gambling, loves to be “hinky-dinked” as much asthe moth loves to play tag with the candle flame. In five minutes Sugarwas selling at 221, and the frantic shorts were grabbing for it as thoughthere never was to be another share put on sale, while Barry Conant andhis lieutenants were most industriously pushing it just beyond theirreaching finger-tips, either by buying it as fast as it was offered bygenuine sellers or by taking what their own pals threw in the air.

I was not surprised to see Bob’s tall form wedged in the crowd abouttwo-thirds of the way from the centre. Every other active floor member wasthere too. Even Ike Bloomstein and Joe Barnes, who seldom went into thebig crowds, were on hand, perhaps to catch a flier for their Thanksgivingturkey money, perhaps to get as near the killing as possible. Bob was nottrading, although, as on the day before, he never took his eye off BarryConant. I said to myself, “He is trying to fathom Barry Conant’smovements,” but for what purpose puzzled me. The hands of the big clock onthe wall showed that trading had been thirty minutes under way and stillBarry Conant was pushing up the price. His voice had just rung out “25 forany part of 5,000” when, like an echo, sounded through the hall, “Sold.”It was Bob. He had worked his way to the centre of the crowd and stood infront of Barry Conant. He was not the Bob who had taken Barry Conant’sgaff that afternoon a few weeks before. I never saw him cooler, calmer,more self-possessed. He was the incarnation of confident power. A cold,cynical smile played around the corners of his mouth as he looked downupon his opponent.

The effect upon Barry Conant was different from that of Bob’s last bid onthe day when Beulah Sands’s hopes went skyward in dust. It did not rousehim to the wild, furious desire for the onslaught that he showed then, butseemed to quicken his alert, prolific mind to exercise all its cunning. Ithink that in that one moment Barry Conant recalled his suspicions of theday before, when he had wondered what Bob’s presence in the crowd meant,and that he saw again the picture of Bob on the day when he himself hadditched Bob’s treasure-train. He hesitated for just the fraction of asecond, while he waved with lightning-like rapidity a set of fingersignals to his lieutenants. Then he squared himself for the encounter. “25for 5,000,” Cold, cold as the voice of a condemning judge rang Bob’s“Sold.” “25 for 5,000.” “Sold.” “25 for 5,000.” “Sold.” Their eyes werefixed upon each other, in Barry’s a defiant glare, in Bob’s mingled pityand contempt. The rest of the brokers hushed their own bids and offersuntil it could have truthfully been said that the floor of the StockExchange was quiet, an almost unheard-of thing in like circumstances.Again Barry Conant’s voice, “25 for 5,000.” “Sold.” “25 for 5,000.”“Sold.” Barry Conant had met his master. Whether it was that for the firsttime in all his wonderful career he realised that the “System” was to meetits Nemesis, or what the cause, none could tell, perhaps not even BarryConant himself, but some emotion caused his olive face for an instant toturn pale, and gave his voice a tell-tale quiver. Once more pealed forth“25 for 5,000.” That Bob saw the pallor, that he caught the quiver, wasevident to all, for the instant his “Sold” rang out, he followed it with“5,000 at 24, 23, 22, 20.” Neither Barry Conant nor any of his lieutenantsgot in a “Take it”; although whether they wanted to or not was an openquestion until Bob allowed his voice to dwell just a pendulum swing oftime on the 20. It was as if he were tantalising them into sticking bytheir guns. By the time he paused, Barry Conant’s nerve was back, for hispiercing “Take it” had linked to it “20 for any part of 10,000.” The bidwas yet on his lips when Bob’s deep voice rang out “Sold.” “Any part of25,000 at 19, 18, 15, 10.” Hell was now loose. Back and forth, up againstthe rail, around the room and back and around again, the crowd surged forfifteen of the wildest, craziest minutes in the history of the New YorkStock Exchange, a history replete with records of wild and crazy scenes.

At last from sheer exhaustion there came a ten minutes’ lull, which wasused in comparing trades. At the beginning of the respite Sugar wasselling at 155, for in that quarter-hour of madness it had broken from 210to 155, but when the ten minutes had elapsed, the stock had worked back to167. Barry Conant had again taken the centre of the crowd after hastilyscanning the brief notes handed him by messenger-boys and giving orders tohis lieutenants. He had evidently received reinforcements in the form ofrenewed orders from his principals. Many of the faces that fringed theinner circle of that crowd were frightful to look upon, some white asthough just lifted from hospital pillows, others red to the verge ofapoplexy—all strained as though awaiting the coming of the jury with alife or death verdict. They all knew that Bob had sold more than a hundredthousand shares of Sugar upon which the profits must be more than fourmillion dollars. Would he resume selling or was he through? Was it shortstock, which must be bought back, or long stock; and if long, whose stock?Were the insiders selling out on one another, or were they all sellingtogether, and under cover of Barry Conant’s movements were Camemeyer and“Standard Oil” emptying their bag preparatory to the slaughter of theWashington contingent? All these questions were rushing through the headsof that crowd of brokers like steam through a boiler, now hot, now cold,but always at high pressure, for upon the correctness of the answersdepended the fortune of many who breathlessly awaited the renewal or thesuspension of the contest. Even Barry Conant’s usually impassive face worea tinge of anxiety.

Indeed, Bob’s was the only one in the centre of that throng that showed nosign of what was going on behind it. The same cynical smile that had beenthere since the opening still played around the corners of his mouth as hesquared himself in front of his opponent. All knew now that he was notthrough. Barry Conant had evidently decided to force the fighting,although more cautiously than before. “67 for a thousand.” One of hislieutenants bid 67 for 500, another 67 for 300, and as Bob had not yetshown his intention of meeting their bids, 67 for different amounts washeard all over the crowd. Bob might have been tossing a mental coin todecide the advisability of buying back what he had sold; he might havebeen adding up the bids as they were made. He said nothing for a fractionof a minute, which to those tortured men must have seemed like an age.Then with a wave of his hand, as though delivering a benediction, he sweptthe circle with a cold-blooded, “Sold the lots. 5,600 in all.”

“Sixty-seven for a thousand”—again Barry Conant’s bid. “Sold.” “67 for5,000.” “Sold.” “66 for a thousand.” “Sold.” The drop from five thousandto one thousand and a dollar a share in Barry Conant’s bids was themortally wounded but still game general’s “Sound the retreat.” Bob heardit. “Any part of 10,000 at 65, 64, 62, 60.” The din was now as fierce asbefore. The entire crowd, all but Barry Conant and his lieutenants, seemedto have concluded that Bob’s renewal of attack meant that his was thewinning side, and those who had been hanging on to their stock, hopingagainst hope, and those who were short and had been undecided whether tocover or to hold on and sell more for greater profits, vied with oneanother in a frantic effort to sell. All could now feel the coming panic.All could see that it was to be a bad one, as the least informed on thefloor knew that there was a tremendous amount of Sugar stock in the handsof Washington novices at speculation and of others who had bought it athigh prices. Sugar was now dropping two, three, five dollars a sharebetween trades, and the panic was spreading to the other poles, as isalways the case, for when there are sudden large losses in one stock, thelosers must throw over the other stocks they hold to meet this loss, andthus the whole structure tumbles like a house of cards. Sugar had justcrossed 110 when the loud bang of the president’s gavel resounded throughthe room. Instantly there was a silence as of death. All knew the meaningof the sound, the most ominous ever heard in a stock exchange, calling forthe temporary suspension of business while the president announces thefailure of some member or house.

Perkins, Blanchard & Company

Announce that They Cannot Meet Their Obligations

This statement that one of the oldest houses had been swamped in the crashBob had started caused further frantic selling, and, as though everymember had employed the lull to refill his lungs, a howl arose that pealedand wailed to the dome.

I watched Bob closely; in fact, it was impossible for me to take my eyesoff him; he seemed absolutely unmindful of the agonised shrieks about him,for the frenzied brokers were no longer crying their bids or offers, butscreaming them. He still continued relentlessly to hammer Sugar, offeringit in thousand and tens of thousand lots.

Again and again the gavel fell, and again and again an announcement offailure was followed by blood-curdling howls. When Sugar struck 80—not180, but plain 80—it seemed that the last day of stock speculation wasat hand. Announcements were being made every few minutes of the failure ofthis bank, the closing of the doors of that trust company. Where would itend? What power could stop this Niagara of molten dollars? Suddenly abovethe tumult rose Bob Brownley’s voice. He must have been standing on histiptoes. His hands were raised aloft. He seemed to tower a head above themob. His voice was still clear and unimpaired by the terrible strain ofthe past two hours. To that mob it must have sounded like the trumpet ofthe delivering angel. “80 for any part of 25,000 Sugar.” Instantly Sugarwas hurled at him from all sides of the crowd. He was the only buyer ofmoment who had appeared since Sugar broke 125. Barry Conant and hislieutenants had disappeared like snowflakes at the opening of the door ofthe firebox of a locomotive speeding through the storm. In a few secondsBob had been sold all the 25,000 he had bid for. Again his voice rang out:“80 for 25,000.” The sellers momentarily halted. He got only a fewthousands of his twenty-five. “85 for 25,000.” A few thousands more. “90for 25,000.” Still fewer thousands. His bidding was beginning to tell onthe mob. A cry ran through the room into the crowds around the otherpoles—“Brownley has turned!”—and taking renewed courage at the report,the bulls rallied their forces and began to bid for the different stocks,which a moment before it had seemed that no one wanted at any price.

In a chip of a minute the whole scene changed; there was almost as wild apanic on the up side as there had been on the down. Bob Brownley continuedbuying Sugar until he had pushed it above 150. He then went about tallyingup his trades. At the end of ten minutes’ calculation he returned to thecentre and bought 11,000 shares more; coming out, his eye caught mine.

“Jim, have you been here long?”

“An eternity. I was here at the opening and I pray God never to put methrough another two hours like the past two. It seems a hideous dream, anightmare. Bob, in the name of God what have you been doing?”

He gave me a wild, awful look of exultation. Sublime triumph shone inthose blazing brown orbs, triumph such as I had never seen in the eyes ofman.

“Jim Randolph, I have been giving Wall Street and its hell ‘System’ adose of its own poison, a good full-measure dose. They planned byharvesting a fresh crop of human hearts and souls on the bull side to giveFriday the 13th a new meaning. Tradition says Friday the 13th is bearSaints’ day. I believe in maintaining old traditions, so I harvested theirhearts instead. I will tell you about it some time, Jim, but now I mustsee Beulah Sands. Jim Randolph, I’ve saved her and her father. I’ve madethem a round three millions and a strong seven millions for myself.”

He almost yelled it as he rushed away and left me dazed, stupefied. Amoment, and I came to. Something urged me to follow him.

Chapter VI.

As I passed through my office a few minutes later I heard Bob’s voice inBeulah Sands’s office. It was raised in passionate eloquence.

“Yes, Beulah, I have done it single-handed. I have crucified Camemeyer,‘Standard Oil,’ and the ‘System’ that spiked me to the cross a few weeksago. You have three millions, and I have seven. Now there is nothing morebut for you to go home to your father, and then come back to me. Back tome, Beulah, back to me to be my wife!”

He stopped. There was no sound. I waited; then, frightened, I stepped tothe door of Beulah Sands’s office. Bob was standing just inside thethreshold, where he had halted to give her the glad tidings. She had risenfrom her desk and was looking at him with an agonised stare. He seemed tobe transfixed by her look, the wild ecstasy of the outburst of love yetmirrored in his eyes. She was just saying as I reached the door:

“Bob, in mercy’s name tell me you got this money fairly, honourably.”

Bob must have realised for the first time what he had done. He did notspeak. He only stared into her eyes. She was now at his side.

“Bob, you are unnerved,” she said; “you have been through a terribleordeal. For an hour I have been reading in the bulletins of the banks andtrust companies that have failed, of the banking-houses that have beenruined. I have been reading that you did it; that you have mademillions—and I knew it was for me, for father, but in the midst of myjoy, my gratitude, my love—for, oh, Bob, I love you,” she interruptedherself passionately; “it seems as though I love you beyond the capacityof a human heart to love. I think that for the right to be yours for onesingle moment of this life I would smilingly endure all the pains andmiseries of eternal torture. Yes, Bob, for the right to have you call meyours for only while I heard the word, I would do anything, Bob, anythingthat was honourable.”

She had drawn his head down close to her face, and her great blue eyessearched his as though they would go to his very soul. She was a child inher simple appeal for him to allow her to see his heart, to see that therewas nothing black there.

As she gazed, her beautiful hands played through his hair as do a mother’sthrough that of the child she is soothing in sickness.

“Bob, speak to me, speak to me,” she begged, “tell me there was nodishonour in the getting of those millions. Tell me no one was made tosuffer as my father and I have suffered. Tell me that the suicides and theconvicts, the daughters dragged to shame and the mothers driven to themadhouse as a result of this panic, cannot be charged to anything unfairor dishonourable that you have done. Bob, oh, Bob, answer! Answer no, ormy heart will break; or if, Bob, you have made a mistake, if you have donethat which in your great desire to aid me and my father seemedjustifiable, but which you now see was wrong, tell it to me, Bob dear, andtogether we will try to undo it. We will try to find a way to atone. Wewill give the millions to the last, last penny to those upon whom you havebrought misery. Father’s loss will not matter. Together we will go to himand tell him what we have done, what we have lived through, tell him ofour mistake, and in our agony he will forget his own. For such a horrorhas my father of anything dishonourable that he will embrace his misery ashappiness when he knows that his teachings have enabled his daughter toundo this great wrong. And then, Bob, we will be married, and you and Iand father and mother will be together, and be, oh, so happy, and we willbegin all over again.”

“Beulah, stop; in the name of God, in the name of your love for me, don’tsay another word. There is a limit to the capacity of a man to suffer,even if he be a great, strong brute like myself, and, Beulah, I havereached that limit. The day has been a hard one.”

His voice softened and became as a tired child’s.

“I must go out into the hustle of the street, into the din and sound, andget down my nerves and get back my head. Then I shall be able to thinkclear and true, and I will come back to you, and together we will see if Ihave done anything that makes me unfit to touch the cheek and the handsand the lips of the best and most beautiful woman God ever put upon earth.Beulah, you know I would not deceive you to save my body from the firesof this world, and my soul from the torture of the damned, and I promiseyou that if I find that I have done wrong, what you call wrong, what yourfather would call wrong, I will do what you say to atone.”

He took her head between his hands, gently, reverently, and touching hislips to her glorious golden hair, he went away.

Beulah Sands turned to me. “Please, Mr. Randolph, go with him. He issoul-dazed. One can never tell what a heart sorely perplexed will promptits owner to do. Often in the night when I have got myself into a feverfrom thinking of my father’s situation, I have had awful temptations. Theagents of the devil seek the wretched when none of those they love are by.I have often thought some of the blackest tragedies of the earth mighthave been averted if there had been a true friend to stand at the wrungone’s elbow at the fatal minute of decision and point to the sun behind,just when the black ahead grew unendurable. Please follow Mr. Brownleythat you may be ready, should his awakening to what he has done becomeunbearable. Tell him the dreaded morrows are never as terrible actually asthey seem in anticipation.”

I overtook Bob just outside the office. I did not speak to him, for Irealised that he was in no mood for company. I dropped in behind,determined that I would not lose sight of him. It was almost one o’clock.Wall Street was at its meridian of frenzy, every one on a wild rush. Theday’s doing had packed the always-crowded money lane. The newsboys wereshouting afternoon editions. “Terrible panic in Wall Street. One managainst millions. Robert Brownley broke ‘the Street.’ Made twenty millionsin an hour. Banks failed. Wreck and ruin everywhere. President Snow ofAsterfield National a suicide.” Bob gave no sign of hearing. He strodewith a slow, measured gait, his head erect, his eyes staring ahead atspace, a man thinking, thinking, thinking for his salvation. Many hurryingmen looked at him, some with an expression of unutterable hatred, asthough they wanted to attack him. Then again there were those who calledhim by name with a laugh of joy; and some turned to watch him incuriosity. It was easy to pick the wounded from those who shared in hisvictory, and from those who knew the frenzied finance buzz-saw only by itsbuzz. Bob saw none. Where could he be going? He came to the head of thestreet of coin and crime and crossed Broadway. His path was blocked by thefence surrounding old Trinity’s churchyard. Grasping the pickets in eitherhand he stared at the crumbling headstones of those guardsmen of Mammonwho once walked the earth and fought their heart battles, as he waswalking and fighting, but who now knew no ten o’clock, no three, wholooked upon the stock-gamblers and dollar-trailers as they looked upon theworms that honeycombed their headstones’ bases. What thoughts went throughBob Brownley’s mind only his Maker knew. For minutes he stood motionless,then he walked on down Broadway. He went into the Battery. The bencheswere crowded with that jetsam and flotsam of humanity that New York’smighty sewers throw in armies upon her inland beaches at every sunrise:Here a sodden brute sleeping off a prolonged debauch, there a lad whosefrankness of face and homespun clothes and bewildered eyes spelt, “fromthe farm and mother’s watchful love.” On another bench an Italian womanwho had a half-dozen future dollar kings and social queens about her, andwhose clothes told of the immigrant ship just into port. Bob Brownleyapparently saw none. But suddenly he stopped. Upon a bench sat asweet-faced mother holding a sleeping babe in her arms, while acurly-pated boy nestled his head in her lap and slept through the magiclanes and fairy woods of dreamland. The woman’s face was one of those thatblend the confidence of girlhood with the uncertainty of womanhood. ’Twasa pretty face, which had been plainly tagged by its Maker for alight-hearted trip through this world, but it had been seared by the ironof the city.

“Mr. Brownley—” She started to rise.

He gently pushed her back with a “hush,” unwilling to rob the sleepers oftheir heaven.

“What are you doing here, Mrs.——?” He halted.

“Mrs. Chase. Mr. Brownley, when I went away from Randolph & Randolph’soffice I married John Chase; you may remember him as delivery clerk. I hadsuch a happy home and my husband was so good; I did not have to typewriteany longer. These are our two children.”

“What are you doing here?”

The tears sprang to her eyes; she dropped them, but did not answer.

“Don’t mind me, woman. I, too, have hidden hells I don’t want the world tosee. Don’t mind me; tell me your story. It may do you good; it may do megood; yes, it may do me good.”

I had dropped into a seat a few feet away. Both were too much occupiedwith their own thoughts to notice me or any one else. I could not overheartheir conversation, but long afterward, when I mentioned our oldstenographer, Bessie Brown, to Bob, he told me of the incident at theBattery. Her husband, after their marriage, had become infected with thestock-gambling microbe, the microbe that gnaws into its victim’s mind andheart day and night, while ever fiercer grows the “get rich, get rich”fever. He had plunged with their savings and had drawn a blank. He hadlost his position in disgrace and had landed in the bucket-shop, thesub-cellar pit of the big Stock Exchange hell. From there a week before hehad been sent to prison for theft, and that morning she had been turnedinto the street by her landlord. I saw Bob take from his pocket hismemorandum-book, write something upon a leaf, tear it out and hand it tothe woman, touch his hat, and before she could stop him, stride away. Isaw her look at the paper, clap her hands to her forehead, look at thepaper again and at the retreating form of Bob Brownley. Then I saw her,yes, there in the old Battery Park, in the drizzling rain and under theeyes of all, drop upon her knees in prayer. How long she prayed I do notknow. I only know that as I followed Bob I looked back and the woman wasstill upon her knees. I thought at the time how queer and unnatural thewhole thing seemed. Later, I learned to know that nothing is queer andunnatural in the world of human suffering; that great human sufferingturns all that is queer and unnatural into commonplace. Next day BessieBrown came to our office to see Bob. Not being able to get at him sheasked for me.

“Mr. Randolph, tell me, please, what shall I do with this paper?” shesaid. “I met Mr. Brownley in the Battery yesterday. He saw I was indistress and he gave me this, but I cannot believe he meant it,” and sheshowed me an order on Randolph & Randolph for a thousand dollars. I cashedher check and she went away.

From the Battery Bob sought the wharves, the Bowery, Five Points, thehothouses of the under-worldlings of America. He seemed bent on pickingout the haunts of misery in the misery-infested metropolis of the newworld. For two hours he tramped and I followed. A number of times Ithought to speak to him and try to win him from his mood, but I refrained.I could see there was a soul battle waging and I realised that upon itsoutcome might depend Bob’s salvation. Some seek the quiet of the woods,the soothing rustle of the leaves, the peaceful ripple of the brook whenbattling for their soul, but Bob’s woods appeared to be the shadowy placesof misery, his rustling leaves the hoarse din of the multitude, and hisbrook’s ripple the tears and tales of the man-damned of the great city,for he stopped and conversed with many human derelicts that he met on hiscourse. The hand of the clock on Trinity’s steeple pointed to four as weagain approached the office of Randolph & Randolph. Bob was now movingwith a long, hurried stride, as though consumed with a fever of desire toget to Beulah Sands. For the last fifteen minutes I had with difficultykept him in sight. Had he arrived at a decision, and if so, what was it? Iasked myself over and over again as I plowed through the crowds.

Bob went straight to Beulah Sands’s office, I to mine. I had been therebut a moment when I heard deep, guttural groans. I listened. The soundcame louder than before. It came from Beulah Sands’s office. With a boundI was at the open door. My God, the sight that met my gaze! It haunts meeven now when years have dulled its vividness. The beautiful, quiet, grayfigure that had grown to be such a familiar picture to Bob and me of late,sat at the flat desk in the centre of the room. She faced the door. Herelbows rested on the desk; in her hand was an afternoon paper that she hadevidently been reading when Bob entered. God knows how long she had beenreading it before he came. Bob was kneeling at the side of her chair, hishands clasped and uplifted in an agony of appeal that was supplemented bythe awful groans. His face showed unspeakable terror and entreaty; theeyes were bursting from their sockets and were riveted on hers as those ofa man in a dungeon might be fixed upon an approaching spectre of one whomhe had murdered. His chest rose and fell, as though trying to burst someunseen bonds that were crushing out his life. With every breath would comethe awful groan that had first brought me to him. Beulah Sands had halfturned her face until her eyes gazed into Bob’s with a sweet, childishperplexity. I looked at her, surprised that one whom I had always seen sointelligently masterful should be passive in the face of such anguish.Then, horror of horrors! I saw that there was something missing from hergreat blue eyes. I looked; gasped. Could it possibly be? With a bound Iwas at her side. I gazed again into those eyes which that morning had beenall that was intelligent, all that was godlike, all that was human. Theirsoul, their life was gone. Beulah Sands was a dead woman; not dead inbody, but in soul; the magic spark had fled. She was but an empty shell—awoman of living flesh and blood; but the citadel of life was empty, themind was gone. What had been a woman was but a child. I passed my handacross my now damp forehead. I closed my eyes and opened them again. Bob’sfigure, with clasped, uplifted hands, and bursting eyes, was still there.There still resounded through the room the awful guttural groans. BeulahSands smiled, the smile of an infant in the cradle. She took one beautifulhand from the paper and passed it over Bob’s bronzed cheek, just as theinfant touches its mother’s face with its chubby fingers. In my horror Ialmost expected to hear the purling of a babe. My eyes in their perplexitymust have wandered from her face, for I suddenly became aware of a greatblack head-line spread across the top of the paper that she had beenreading:

“FRIDAY, THE 13TH.”

And beneath in one of the columns:

“TERRIBLE TRAGEDY IN VIRGINIA”

“THE MOST PROMINENT CITIZEN OF THE STATE, EX-UNITED STATES SENATOR AND EX-GOVERNOR, JUDGE LEE SANDS OF SANDS LANDING, WHILE TEMPORARILY INSANE FROM THE LOSS OF HIS FORTUNE AND MILLIONS OF THE FUNDS FOR WHICH HE WAS TRUSTEE, CUT THE THROAT OF HIS INVALID WIFE, HIS DAUGHTER’S, AND THEN HIS OWN. ALL THREE DIED INSTANTLY.”

In another column:

“ROBERT BROWNLEY CREATES THE MOST DISASTROUS PANIC IN THE HISTORY OF WALL STREET AND SPREADS WRECK AND RUIN THROUGHOUT THE COUNTRY.”

A hideous picture seared its every light and shade on my mind, through myheart, into all my soul. A frenzied-finance harvest scene with its gorycrop; in the centre one living-dead, part of the picture, yet the ghostleft to haunt the painters, one of whom was already cowering before theblack and bloody canvas.

Well did the word-artist who wrote over the door of the madhouse, “Man cansuffer only to the limit, then he shall know peace,” understand thewondrous wisdom of his God. Beulah Sands had gone beyond her limit and wasat peace.

The awful groaning stopped and an ashen pallor spread over Bob Brownley’sface. Before I could catch him he rolled backward upon the floor as dead.Bob Brownley, too, had gone beyond his limit. I bent over him and liftedhis head, while the sweet woman-child knelt and covered his face withkisses, calling in a voice like that of a tiny girl speaking to her doll,“Bob, my Bob, wake up, wake up; your Beulah wants you.” As I placed myhand upon Bob’s heart and felt its beats grow stronger, as I listened toBeulah Sands’s childish voice, joyously confident, as it called upon theone thing left of her old world, some of my terror passed. In its placecame a great mellowing sense of God’s marvellous wisdom. I thoughtgratefully of my mother’s always ready argument that the law of all laws,of God and nature, is that of compensation. I had allowed Bob’s head tosink until it rested in Beulah’s lap, and from his calm and steadybreathing I could see that he had safely passed a crisis, that at least hewas not in the clutches of death, as I had at first feared.

Bob slept. Beulah Sands ceased her calling and with a smile raised herfingers to her lips and softly said, “Hush, my Bob’s asleep.” Together weheld vigil over our sleeping lover and friend, she with the happiness of achild who had no fear of the awakening, I with a silent terror of whatshould come next. I had seen one mind wafted to the unknown that day. Wasit to have a companion to cheer and solace it on its far journey to thegreat beyond? How long we waited Bob’s awakening I could not tell. Theclock’s hands said an hour; it seemed to me an age. At last hismagnificent physique, his unpoisoned blood and splendid brain pulled himthrough to his new world of mind and heart torture. His eyelids lifted. Helooked at me, then at Beulah Sands, with eyes so sad, so awful in theirperplexed mournfulness, that I almost wished they had never opened, or hadopened to let me see the childlike look that now shone from the girl’s.His gaze finally rested on her and his lips murmured “Beulah.”

“There, Bob, I thought you would know it was time to wake up.” She bentover and kissed him on the eyes again and again with the loving ardour achild bestows upon its pets.

He slowly rose to his feet. I could see from his eyes and the shudder thatwent over him as he caught sight of the paper on the desk that he washimself; that memory of the happenings of the day had not fled in hissleep. He rose to his full height, his head went up, and his shouldersback, but only from habit and for an instant. Then he folded Beulah Sandsto his breast and dropped his head upon her shoulder. He sobbed like afather with the corpse of his child.

“Why, Bob, my Bob, is this the way you treat your Beulah when she’s letyou sleep so your beautiful eyes would be pretty for the wedding? Is thisthe way to act before this kind man who has come to take us to the church?Naughty, naughty Bob.”

I looked at her, at Bob, in horror. I was beginning to realise theabsolute deadness of this woman. From the first look I had known that hermind had fled, but knowledge is not always realisation. She did not evenknow who I was. Her mind was dead to all but the man she loved, the manwho through all those long days of her suffering she had silentlyworshiped. To all but him she was new-born.

At the sound of “wedding,” “church,” Bob’s head slowly rose from hershoulder. I saw his decision the instant I caught his eye; I realised theuselessness of opposing it, and, sick at heart and horrified, I listenedas he said in a voice now calm and soothing as that of a father to hischild, “Yes, Beulah, my darling, I have slept too long. Bob has beennaughty, but we will make up for lost time. Get your hat and cloak andwe’ll hurry to the church or we will be late.”

With a laugh of joy she followed him to the closet where hung the littlegray turban and the pretty gray jacket. He took them from their peg andgave them to her.

“Not a word, Jim,” he bade me. “In the name of God and all our friendship,not a word. Beulah Sands will be my wife as soon as I can find a ministerto marry us. It is best, best. It is right. It is as God would have it, orI am not capable of knowing right from wrong. Anyway, it is what will be.She has no father, no mother, no sister, no one to protect and shield her.The ‘System’ has robbed her of all in life, even of herself, ofeverything, Jim, but me. I must try to win her back for herself, or tomake her new world a happy one—a happy one for her.”

Chapter VII.

An old gambler, whose life had been spent listening to the rattle of thedrop-in-bound-out little roulette ball, was told by a fellow victim, ashis last dollar went to the relentless tiger’s maw, that the keeper’s footwas upon an electric button which enabled him to make the ball drop wherehis stake was not. He simply said, “Thank God. I thought that prince ofcheats, Fate, who all through life has had his foot on the button of mygame, was the one who did the trick.” Long suffering had driven the oldgambler to the loser’s bible, Philosophy! Cheated by man’s device, he knewhe had some chance of getting even; but Fate he could not combat.

Bob Brownley had thought himself in hard luck when his eyes opened to thefact that he had been robbed by means of dice loaded by man, but when Fatepressed the button he saw that his man-made hell was but a feebleimitation, and—was satisfied, as whoever knows the game of life issatisfied, because—he must be. Bob’s strong head bowed, his iron willbent, and meekly his soul murmured, “Thy will be done.”

That night he married Beulah Sands. The minister who united the grown-upman and the woman who was as a new-born babe saw nothing extraordinary inthe match. He murmured to me, who acted as best man to the groom, maid ofhonour to the bride, and father and mother to both, “We see strangesights, we ministers of the great city, Mr. Randolph. The sweet littlelady appears to be a trifle scared.” My explanation that she and Mr.Brownley were the only survivors of the awful tragedies of the day wassufficient. He was satisfied when he got no other response to hisquestion, “Do you take this man to be your wedded husband?” than a sweetchildish smile as she snuggled closer to Bob.

Bob and his bride went South to his mother and sisters the next day. Heleft to me the settlement of his trades. He instructed me to set aside$3,000,000 profits for Beulah Sands-Brownley, and insisted that I pay fromthe balance the notes he had given me a few weeks before. There remainedsomething over $5,000,000 for himself.

The leading Wall Street paper, in its preachment on the panic, wound upwith:

“Wall Street has lived through many black Fridays. Some of them have been thirteenth-of-the-month Fridays, but no Friday yet marked from the calendar, no Saturday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday yet garnered to the storehouse of the past was ever more jubilantly welcomed by his Satanic Majesty than yesterday. We pray heaven no coming day may be ordained to go against yesterday’s record for tigerish cruelty and awful destruction. It is rumoured that Mr. Brownley of Randolph & Randolph, either for himself or his clients cleared twenty-five millions of profit. We believe that this estimate is low. The losses coming through Robert Brownley’s terrible onslaught must have run over five hundred millions. Wall Street and the country will do well to take the moral of yesterday’s market to their heart. It is this: The concentration of wealth in the hands of a few Americans is a menace to our financial structure. It is the unanimous opinion of ‘the Street’ that Robert Brownley could never have succeeded in battering down the price of Sugar in the very teeth of the Camemeyer and Standard Oil support as he did yesterday, without a cash backing of from fifty to one hundred millions. If a vast aggregation of money owners deliberately place themselves behind an onslaught such as was so successfully made yesterday, why can that slaughter not be repeated at any time, on any stock, and against the support of any backing?”

When I read this and listened to talk along the same lines, I was puzzled.I could not for the life of me see where Bob Brownley could have got fiveto ten millions’ backing for such a raid, much less fifty to a hundred.Yet I was forced to confess that he must have had some tremendous backing;else how could he have done what I had seen him do?

Bob left his wife at his mother’s house while he went to Sands Landing tothe funeral. After the old judge and his victims had been laid away andthe relatives had gathered in the library of the great white Sandsmansion, he explained their kinswoman’s condition and told them that shewas his wife. He insisted upon paying all Judge Sands’s debts, over$500,000 of which was owed to members of the Sands family for whom he hadbeen trustee. Before he went back to his mother’s, Bob had turned a greatcalamity into an occasion for something near rejoicing. Judge Sands andhis family were very dear to the people of the section, but his misfortunehad threatened such wide-spread ruin that the unlooked-for recovery of amillion and a half was a godsend that made for happiness.

Two days after the funeral Bob’s dearest hope fled. He had ordered allthings at the Sands plantation put in their every-day condition. BeulahSands’s uncles, aunts, and cousins had arranged to welcome her and to tryby every means in their power to coax back her lost mind. They assured Bobthat, barring the absence of Beulah’s father, mother, and sister, therewould not be a memory-recaller missing. Bob and his wife landed from theriver packet at the foot of the driveway, which led straight from thelanding to the vine-covered, white-pillared portico. Bob’s agony must havebeen awful when his wife clapped her hands in childish joy as sheexclaimed, “Oh, Bob, what a pretty place!” She gave no sign that she hadever seen the great entrance, through which she had come and gone from herbabyhood. Bob took her to the library, to her mother’s room, to her own,to the nursery where were the dolls and toys of her childhood, but therecame no sign of recognition, nothing but childish pleasure. She looked ather aunts and uncles and the cousins with whom she had spent her life,bewildered at finding so many strangers in the otherwise quiet place. As alast hope, they led in her old black foster-mother, who had nursed her inbabyhood, who was the companion of her childhood and the pet of herwomanhood. There was not a dry eye in the library when she met the oldmammy’s outburst of joy with the puzzled gaze of the child who does notunderstand. The grief of the old negress was pitiful as she realised thatshe was a stranger to her “honey bird.” The child seemed perplexed at hergrief. It was plain to all that the Sands home meant nothing to the lastof the judge’s family.

Bob brought her back to New York and besought the aid of the medicalexperts of America and of the Old World to regain that which had beenrecalled by its Maker. The doctors were fascinated with this new phase ofmind blight, for in some particulars Beulah’s case was unlike any knowninstances, but none gave hope. All agreed that some wire connecting heartand brain had burned out when the cruel “System” threw on a voltage beyondthe wire’s capacity to transmit. All agreed that the woman-child wifewould never grow older unless through some mental eruption beyond humanpower to produce. Some of the medical men pointed to one possibility, butthat one was too terrible for Bob to entertain.

The first anniversary of their marriage found Bob and his wife settled intheir new Fifth Avenue mansion. He had bought and torn down two oldhouses between Forty-second and Forty-third Streets and had erected apalace, the inside of which was unique among all New York’s unusualstructures. The first and second floors were all that refined taste andunlimited expenditure of money could produce. Nothing on those splendidfloors told of the strange things above. A sedate luxury pervaded thedrawing-rooms, library, and dining-room. Bob said to me, in taking methrough them, “Some day, Jim, Beulah may recover, may come back to me, andI want to have everything as she would wish, everything as she would havehad it if the curse had never come.” The third floor was Beulah’s. Achild’s dainty bedroom; two nurses’ rooms adjoining; a nursery, with achild’s small schoolroom and a big playroom, with dolls and doll houses,child’s toys of every description in abandon, as though their owner werein fact but a few years old. Across the hall were three offices, exactduplicates of mine, Bob’s, and Beulah Sands’s at Randolph & Randolph’s.When I first saw them it was with difficulty that I brought myself torealise that I was not where the gruesome happenings of a year before hadtaken place. Bob had reproduced to the minutest details our down-townworkshop. Standing in the door of Beulah Sands’s office I faced the flatdesk at which she had sat the afternoon when I first saw that hideousresult of the work of the “System.” I could almost see the little grayfigure holding the afternoon paper. In horror my eyes sought the floor atthe side of the chair in search of Bob’s agonised face and uplifted hands.As I stood for the first time in the middle of Bob’s handiwork, I seemedto hear again those awful groans.

“Jim,” Bob said, “I have a haunting idea that some day Beulah will wakeand look around and think she has been but a few minutes asleep. If sheshould, she must have nothing to disabuse her mind until we break the newsto her. I have instructed her nurses, one or the other of whom never losessight of her night or day, to win her to the habit of spending her time ather old desk; I have told them always to be prepared for her awakening,and when it comes they are instantly to shut off the rest of the floor andhouse until I can get to her. Here comes Beulah now.”

Out of the nursery came a laughing, happy child-woman. In spite of herfinely developed, womanly figure, which had lost nothing of its wonderfulbeauty, and the exquisite face and golden-brown hair and great blue eyes,which were as fascinating as on the day she first entered the offices ofRandolph & Randolph; in spite of the close-fitting gray gown with daintyturned-over lace collar, I could hardly bring myself to believe that shewas anything but a young child. With an eager look and a happy laugh shewent to Bob and throwing her arms about his neck, covered his face withkisses.

“Good Bob has come back to play with Beulah,” she said, “She knew hewould. They told Beulah Bob had gone away to the woods to gather prettyflowers. Beulah knew if Bob had gone to the woods he would have takenBeulah with him. Now Bob must play school with Beulah.” She sat at herdesk and opened her child’s school-book. With mock severity she said,“Bob, c-a-t. What does it spell?” For half an hour Bob sat and playedscholar and teacher by turns with all the patience of a fond father. Withdifficulty I kept back the tears the sad sight brought to my eyes.

For the first year of Bob’s marriage we saw but little of him at theoffice. The Exchange saw less. He had wandered in upon the floor two orthree times, but did no business and seemed to take but little interest.

“The Street” knew Bob had married the daughter of Judge Lee Sands, thevictim of Tom Reinhart’s cold-blooded Seaboard Air Line deal. Otherwise itknew nothing of the affair. His friends never met his wife. Occasionallythey would pass the Brownley carriage on the avenue or in the park and,taking it for granted that the beautiful woman was Mrs. Brownley, theythought Bob a lucky fellow. It seemed quite natural that his wife shouldchoose seclusion after the awful tragedy at her home in Virginia. But theycould not understand why, with such cause for mourning, the exquisitefigure beside Bob in the victoria should always be garbed in gray. After awhile it was whispered that there was something wrong in Bob’s household.Then his friends and acquaintances ceased to whisper or to think of hisaffairs. With all New York’s bad points—and they are as plentiful as herchurch spires and charity bazaars—she has one offsetting virtue. If adweller in her midst chooses to let New York alone, New York is willing toreciprocate. In her most crowded fashionable districts a person may comeand go for a lifetime, and none in the block in which he dwells will knowwhen his coming and going ceases. When a New Yorker reads in his newspaperof the man who lives next door to him, “murdered and his body discoveredby the gas man” or the tax collector, the butcher or the baker, as thecase may be, he never thinks he may have been remiss in his neighbourlyduties. There is no such word as “neighbour” in the New York Citydictionary. It may have been there once, but, if so, it was longago used as a stake for the barbed-wire fence of exclusivekeep-your-distance-we-keep-our-distance-until-we-know-youness. It is toldof a minister from the rural districts, an old-fashioned American, whocame to New York to take charge of a parish, that he started out to makehis calls and was seized in the hall of what in civilisation would havebeen his next-door neighbour. He was rushed away to Bellevue forexamination as to sanity. The verdict was: “Insane. Had no letter ofintroduction and was not in the set.”

Shortly after the first anniversary of his wedding Bob gave up his officewith Randolph & Randolph and opened one for himself. He explained that hewas giving up his commission business to devote all his time to personaltrading. With the opening of his new office he again became the mostactive man on the floor. His trading was intermittent. For weeks he wouldnot be seen at the Exchange or on “the Street.” Then he would return and,after executing a series of brilliant trades, which were invariablysuccessful, he would again disappear. He soon became known as the luckiestoperator in Wall Street, and the beginning of his every new deal was thesignal for his fast-growing following to tag on.

From time to time I learned that Beulah Sands was making no realimprovement, though in some details she had learned as a child learns. Butthere was no indication that she would ever regain her lost mind.

Strange stories of Bob’s doings began to seep into my office. For longperiods he would disappear. Neither the nurses in charge of his wife, norhis brother, mother, and sisters, for whom he had purchased a mansion afew blocks above his own, would hear a word from him. Then he wouldreturn as suddenly as he had disappeared, and his wild eyes and haggardface would tell of a prolonged and desperate soul struggle. He drank oftennow, a habit he had never before indulged in.

For ten days before the second anniversary of his marriage he had beenmissing. On the morning of the anniversary he appeared at the Exchange,wild-eyed and dare-devil reckless. The market had been advancing for weeksand was at a high level. Tom Reinhart and his branch of the “System” wereworking out a new fleecing of the public in Union and Northern Pacific. Atthe strike of the gong Bob took possession of the Union Pacific pole andin thirty minutes had precipitated a panic by his merciless selling. Ourhouse was heavily interested in the Pacifics, although not in connectionwith Reinhart and his crowd. As soon as I got word that Bob was the causeof the slaughter, I rushed over to the Exchange and working my way intothe crowd, I begged a word with him. He had broken both stocks over fiftypoints a share and the panic was raging through the room. He glared at me,but finally followed me out into the lobby. At first he would not heed myappeal, but finally he said, “Jim, it is too bad to let up. I haddetermined to rub this devilish institution off the map, but if it reallyis a case of injury to the house, it’s my opportunity to do something foryou who have done so much for me, so here goes.” He threw himself into theUnion Pacific crowd, first giving an order to a group of his brokers, whojumped for a number of other poles. Almost instantly the panic was stayedand stocks were bounding upward two to five points at a leap. Bobcontinued buying Union Pacific and his brokers other stocks in unlimitedquantities. Nothing like such a quick turn of the market had been seenbefore. His power to absorb stocks seemed to be boundless. It wasestimated that personally and through his brokers he bought over half amillion shares before he joined me and left the Exchange.

I looked at him in wonderment. “Bob, I cannot understand you,” I said atlast as we turned out of Broad Street into Wall. “It seems as if you workwith magic. Everything you touch turns to gold.”

He wheeled on me. “Yes, Jim, you are right. Gold, heartless, soullessgold. But what is the dross good for? What is it good for to me? To-day Isuppose I have made the biggest one-man killing in the history of ‘theStreet.’ I must be an easy twenty-five millions richer in gold than I wasthis morning, and I had enough then to dam the East River and a goodsection of the North. But tell me, Jim, tell me, what can it buy in thisworld that I have not got? I had health and happiness, perfect health,pure happiness, when I did not have a thousand all told. Now I have fiftymillions, and I know how to get fifty or five hundred and fifty more anytime I care to take them, and I have only physical and mental hell. Nobeggar in all the world is so poor in happiness as I. Tell me, tell me,Jim, in the name of God, if there is one—for already the game of gold isrobbing me of my faith in God—where can I buy a little, just a littlehappiness with all this cursed yellow dirt? What will it get me in thenext world, Jim Randolph, what will it get me? If I had died when I waspoor, I think you will agree with me that, if there is a heaven, I shouldhave stood an even chance of getting there. Now on a day like to-day, whenyou see the results of my work, the results of my handling of unlimitedgold, you must agree that if I were taken off I should stand more than aneven show of landing in hell where the sulphur is thickest and the flamesare hottest.”

We were at the entrance of Randolph & Randolph’s office as he poured outthis terrible torrent of bitterness. He glared at me as a dungeon prisonermight glare at his keeper for his answer to “Where can I find liberty?” Ihad no words to answer him. As I noted the awful changes his new life wasmaking in every line of his face, the rigid hardness, the haunted, nervouslook of desperation, which seemed a forerunner of madness, I could notsee, either, where his millions brought any happiness. His hair, whichonce was smooth and orderly, hung over his forehead in an unparted mass oftangled curls, and here and there showed a streak of white. Bob Brownleywas still handsome, even more fascinating than before the mercury enteredhis soul, but it was that wild, awful beauty of the caged lion, lashinghimself into madness with memories of his lost freedom.

“Jim,” he went on, when he saw I could not answer, “I guess you don’t knowwhere I can swap the yellow mud for balm of Gilead. I won’t bother youwith my troubles any longer. I will go up-town and see the little girlwhose happiness Tom Reinhart needed in his business. I will go up and showher the pictures in this week’sCollier’s of the fine hospital forincurables that Reinhart has so generously and nobly built at a cost oftwo and a half millions! The little girl may think better of Reinhart whenshe knows that her father’s money was put to such good use. Who knows butthe great finance king may dedicate it as the ‘Judge Lee Sands Home’ andcarve over the entrance a bas-relief of her father, mother, and sisterwith Hope, Faith, and Charity coming from the mouths of their hangingsevered heads?”

Bob Brownley laughed a horrible ringing laugh as he uttered these awfulwords. Then he beat his hand down on my shoulders as he said in a hoarsevoice, “Jim, but for you I should have had crimps in that jackalphilanthropist’s soul by now and in the souls of his kind. But never mind.He will keep; he will surely keep until I get to him. Every day he liveshe will be fitter for the crimping. Within the short two years since hefinished grilling Judge Sands’s soul, he has put himself in better formto appreciate his reward. I see by the press that at last his aristocraticwife has gold-cured Newport of its habit of dating back the name Reinhartto her scullionhood, and it has taken her into the high-instep circle. Iread the other day of his daughter’s marriage to some English nob, and ofthe discovery of the ancient Reinhart family tree and crest with themailed hand and two-edged dirk and the vulture rampant, and the motto,‘Who strikes in the back strikes often.’”

He left me with his laugh still ringing in my ears. I shuddered as Ipassed under the old black-and-gold sign my uncle and my father had nailedover the office entrance in an age now dead, an age when Wall Street mentalked of honour and gold, not gold and more gold.

In telling my wife of the day’s happenings I could not refrain from givingvent to the feelings that consumed me. “Kate, Bob will surely do somethingawful one of these days. I can see no hope for him. He grows more and morethe madman as he broods over his horrible situation. The whole thing seemsincredible to me. Never was a human being in such perpetual livingpurgatory—unlimited, absolute power on the one hand, unfathomable,never-cool-down hell on the other.”

“Jim, how does he do what he does? I cannot make out from anything I haveread or you have told me, how he creates those panics and makes all thatmoney.”

“No one has ever been able to figure it out,” I answered. “I understandthe stock business, but I cannot for the life of me see how he does it. Hehas none of the money powers in league with him, that’s sure, for in themood he has been in during the past two years it would be impossible forhim to work with them, even if his salvation depended on it. The mentionof any of the big ‘System’ men drives him to a fury. He has to-day mademore money than any one man ever made in a day since the world began, andhe had only commenced his work when he quit to please me. As I stand inthe Exchange and watch him do it, it seems commonplace and simple.Afterward it is beyond my comprehension. At the gait he is going, theRockefeller, Vanderbilt, and Gould fortunes combined will look tiny incomparison with the one he will have in a few years. It is beyond my powerof figuring out, and it gives me a headache every time I try to seethrough it.”

Chapter VIII.

A number of times during the following year, and finally on theanniversary of the Sands tragedy, Bob carried the Exchange to the verge ofpanic, only to turn the market and save “the Street” in the end. Hisprofits were fabulous. Already his fortune was estimated to be between twoand three hundred millions, one of the largest in the world. His name hadbecome one of terror wherever stocks were dealt in. Wall Street had cometo regard his every deal, from the moment that he began operations, asinevitably successful. Now and again he would jump into the market whensome of the plunging cliques had a bear raid under way, and would put themto rout by buying everything in sight and bidding up prices until itlooked as though he intended to do as extraordinary work on the up-side ashe was wont to do on the down. At such times he was the idol of theExchange, which worships the man who puts prices up as it hates him whopulls them down. Once when war news flashed over the wires from Washingtonand rumour had the Cabinet members, Senators, and Congressmen selling themarket short on advance information, when the “Standard Oil” banks had putup money rates to 150 per cent, and a crash seemed inevitable, Bobsuddenly smashed the loan market by offering to lend one hundred millionsat four per cent.; and by buying and bidding up prices at the same time,he put the whole Washington crowd and its New York accomplices todisastrous rout and caused them to lose millions. He continued hisoperations with increasing violence and increasing profits up to thefourth anniversary of the tragedy. On the intervening anniversary I hadbeen compelled by self-interest and fear that he would really pull downthe entire Wall Street structure, to rush in and fairly drag him off. Butwith his growing madness my influence was waning. Each raid it was withgreater difficulty that I got his ear.

Finally, on the fourth anniversary, in a panic that seemed to be runninginto something more terrible than any previous, he savagely refused toaccede to my appeal, telling me that he would not stop, even if Randolph& Randolph were doomed to go down in the crash. It had become known on thefloor that I was the only one who could do anything with him in hisfrenzies, and my pleading with him in the lobby was watched by the membersof the Exchange with triple eyed suspense. When it was clear from hisemphatic gestures and raised voice—for he was in a reckless mood fromdrink and madness and took no pains to disguise his intentions—that Icould not prevail upon him, there was a frantic rush for the poles tothrow over stocks in advance of him. Suddenly, after I had turned from himin despair, there flashed into my mind an idea. The situation wasdesperate. I was dealing with a madman, and I decided that I was justifiedin making this last try. I rushed back to him. “Bob, good-bye,” Iwhispered in his ear, “good-bye. In ten minutes you will get word that JimRandolph has cut his throat!” He stopped as though I had plunged a knifeinto him, struck his forehead a resounding blow, and into his wild browneyes came a sickening look of fear.

“Stop, Jim, for God’s sake, don’t say that to me. My cup is full now.Don’t tell me I am to have that crime on my soul.” He thought a moment.“I don’t know whether you mean it, Jim, but I can take no chances, not forall the money in the world, not even for revenge. Wait here, Jim.” Heyelled for his brokers, and several rushed to him from different parts ofthe room. He sent them back into the crowd while he dashed for theAmalgamated-pole. The day was saved.

Presently he came back to me. “Jim, I must have a talk with you. Come overto my office.” When we got there he turned the key and stood in front ofme. His great eyes looked full into mine. In college days, gazing intotheir brown depths, by some magic I seemed to see the heroes and heroinesof always happy-ending tales, as the child sees enchanted creatures farback in the burning Yule log flames. But there were no joyous beings inthe haunted depths of Bob’s eyes that day.

“Jim, you gave me an awful scare,” he said brokenly. “Don’t ever do itagain. I have little left to live for. To be sure I have some feeling formother, Fred, and sisters. But for you I have a love second only to that Ishould have felt for Beulah had I been allowed to have her. The thought,Jim, that I had wrecked your life, with all you have to live for, wouldhave been the last straw. My life is purgatory. Beulah is only anever-present curse to me—a ghost that rends my heart and soul, one minutewith a blind frenzy to revenge her wrongs, the next with an icy remorsethat I have not already done so. If I did not have her, perhaps in time Icould forget; perhaps I might lay out some scheme to help poor devilswhose poverty makes life unendurable, and with the millions I have takenfrom that main shaft of hell I might do things that would at least bringquiet to my soul; but it is impossible with the living corpse of BeulahSands before me every minute and that devil machinery whirling in my brainall the time the song, ‘Revenge her and her father, revenge yourself.’ Itis impossible to give it up, Jim. I must have revenge. I must stop thismachinery that is smashing up more American hearts and souls each yearthan all the rest of earth’s grinders combined. Every day I delay I becomemore fiendish in my desires. Jim, don’t think I do not know that I haveliterally turned into a fiend. Whenever of late I see myself in themirror, I shudder. When I think of what I was when your father stood us upin his office and started us in this heart-shrivelling, soul-callousingbusiness, and what I am now, I cannot keep the madness down except withrum. You know what it means for me to say this, me who started with allthe pride of a Brownley; but it is so, Jim. The other night I went homewith my soul frozen with thoughts of the past and with my brain ablazewith rum, intending to end it all. I got out my revolver, and woke Beulah,but as I said, ‘Bob is going to kill Beulah and himself,’ she laughed thatsweet child’s laugh and clapping her hands said, ‘Bob is so good to playwith Beulah,’ and then I thought of that devil Reinhart and the otherfiends of the ‘System’ being left to continue their work unhindered and Icould not do it. I must have revenge; I must smash that heart-crushingmachinery. Then I can go, and take Beulah with me. Now, Jim, let us haveit clearly understood once and for all.”

Remorse and softness were past; he was the Indian again. “I am going towreck that hell-annex some day, and that some day will be the next time Istart in. Don’t argue with me, don’t misunderstand me. To-day you stoppedme. I don’t know whether you meant what you threatened; I don’t care now.It is just as well that I stopped, for the ‘System’s’ machine will bethere whenever I start in again. It loses nothing of its fiendishness,none of its destructive powers by grinding, but, on the contrary, as youknow, it increases its speed every day it runs. Now, Jim Randolph, I wantto tell you that you must get yours and the house’s affairs in such shapethat you won’t be hurt when I go into that human rat-pit the next time,for when I come from it the New York Stock Exchange and the ‘System’ willhave had their spines unjointed. Yes, and I’ll have their hearts out, too.Neither will ever again be able to take from the American people theirsavings and their manhood and womanhood and give them in exchangeunadulterated torment. I am going to be fair with you, Jim; this is thelast time I will discuss the subject. After this you must take your chancewith the rest of those who have to do with the cursed business. When Istrike again, none will be spared. I will wreck ‘the Street’, and theinnocent will go down with the guilty, if they have any stocks on hand atthat time.

“My power, Jim, is unlimited; nothing can stay it. I am not going toexplain any further. You have seen me work. You must know that my power isgreater than the ‘System’s,’ and you and I and ‘the Street’ have alwaysknown that the ‘System’ is more powerful than the Government, morepowerful than are the courts, legislatures, Congress, and the President ofthe United States combined, that it absolutely controls the foundation onwhich they rest—the money of the nation. But my power is greater, athousand, yes, a million times greater than theirs. Jim, they say that Ihave made more money than any man in the world. They say that I have fivehundred millions of dollars, but the fools don’t keep track of mymovements. They only know that I have pulled five hundred millions from myopen whirls, the ones they have had an opportunity to keep tab on. But Itell you that I have made even more in my secret deals than the amountthey have seen me take. I have had my agents with my capital in everydeal, every steal the ‘System’ has rigged up. The world has been throwingup its hands in horror because Carnegie, the blacksmith of Pittsburgh,pulled off three hundred millions of swag in the Steel hold-up—yes,swag, Jim. Don’t scowl as though you wanted to read me a lecture on thecoarseness of my language. I have learned to call this game of ours by itsright name. It is not business enterprise with earned profits as results,but pulled-off tricks with bags of loot—black-jack swag—for their end.

“I got away with three hundred millions when Steel slumped from 105 to 50and from 50 to 8, and no one knew I’d made a dollar. You and ‘the Street’read every morning last year the ‘guesses’ as to who could be rounding upthe hundreds of millions on the slump. The papers and the market lettersone morning said it was ‘Standard Oil’; the next, that it was Morgan; thenit was Frick, Schwab, Gates, and so on down through the list. Of course,none of them denied; it is capital to all these knights of the road to bemaking millions in the minds of the world, even though they never get anyof the money. Dick Turpin and Jonathan Wild never were fonder of havingthe daring hold-ups that other highwaymen perpetrated laid to their doors,than are these modern bandits of being credited with ruthless deeds thatthey did not commit. But Jim, ’twas I, ’twas I who sold Pennsylvaniaevery morning for a year, while the selling was explained by the press as‘Cassatt cutting down Gould’s telegraph poles. Gould and old manRockefeller selling Pennsylvania to get even.’ Jim Randolph, I have to-daya billion dollars, not the Rockefeller or Carnegie kind, but a realbillion. If I had no other power but the power to call to-morrow for thatbillion in cash, it would be sufficient to lay in waste the financialworld before to-morrow night. You are welcome, Jim, to any part of thatbillion, and the more you take the happier you will make me, but when Istrike in again, don’t attempt to stay me, for it will do no good.”

Shortly after this talk Bob left for Europe with Beulah. A great Germanexpert on brain disorders had held out hope that a six month’s treatmentat his sanitarium in Berlin might aid in restoring her mind. They returnedthe following August. The trip had been fruitless. It was plain to me thatBob was the same hopelessly desperate man as when he left, more hopeless,more desperate if anything than when he warned me of his determination.

When he left for Europe “the Street” breathed more freely, and as timewent by and there was no sign of his confidence-disturbing influence inthe market, the “System” began to bring out its deferred deals. Times wereripe for setting up the most wildly inflated stock lamb-shearing traps. Ithad been advertised throughout the world that Tom Reinhart, now atwo-hundred-time millionaire, was to consolidate his and many otherenterprises into one gigantic trust with twelve billions of capital. HisUnion and Southern Pacific Railroads, his coal and Southern lines,together with his steamship company and lead, iron, and copper mines, wereto be merged with the steel, traction, gas, and other enterprises he ownedjointly with “Standard Oil.” Some of the railroads owned by Rockefellerand his pals, in which Reinhart had no part, were to go in too, and withthese was to unite that mother hog of them all, “Standard Oil” itself. Thetrust was to be an enormous holding company, the like of which had untilthen not even been dreamed of by the most daring stock manipulators. The“System’s” banks, as well as trust and insurance companies throughout thecountry, had for a long time been getting into shape by concentrating themoney of the country for this monster trust. It was newspaper and newsbureau gossip that Reinhart and his crowd had bought millions of shares ofthe different stocks involved in the deal, and it was common knowledgethat upon its successful completion Reinhart’s fortune would be in theneighbourhood of a billion. On October 1st the certificate of theAnti-People’s Trust, $12,000,000,000 capital, 120,000,000 shares, werelisted upon the New York, London, and Boston Stock Exchanges, and theGerman and French Bourses, and trading in them started off fast andfurious at 106. The claim that one billion of the twelve billions capitalhad been set aside to be used in protecting and manipulating the stock inthe market, had been so widely advertised that even the most daringplunger did not think of selling it short.

It was evident to all in the stock-gambling world that this was to be the“System’s” grand coup, that at its completion the masses would be rudelyawakened to a realisation that their savings were invested in the combinedAmerican industries at vastly inflated values, that the few had all thereal money, and that any attempt upon the people’s part to regulate andcontrol the new system of robbery, would be fraught with unparalleleddisaster—not to the “System,” but to the people.

Since Bob’s return from Europe I had seen him but a few times. Up toOctober 1st he had not been near the Stock Exchange or “the Street.”Shortly after the listing of the “People Be Damned,” as “the Street” haddubbed the new trust, he began to show up at his office regularly. Thiswas the condition of affairs when Fred Brownley called me up on thetelephone, as I related at the beginning of my story, which I did notrealise I had been so long in telling.

My thoughts had been chasing each other with lightning-like rapidity backover the last five years and the fifteen before them, and each thoughtdeepened the black mist over my present mental vision. In the midst of myreflections my telephone rang again.

“Mr. Randolph, for Heaven’s sake have you done nothing yet?” It was FredBrownley’s voice. “Things are frightful here. Bob’s brokers are sellingstocks at five and ten thousand-lot clips. Barry Conant is leadingReinhart’s forces. It is said he has the pool’s protection order inAnti-People’s and that it is unlimited, but Bob has the Reinhart crowdpretty badly scared. Swan has just finished giving Conant a hundredthousand off the reel in 10,000 lots, and he told me a moment ago he wasgoing over to get Bob himself to face Barry Conant. They’re down twentypoints on the average, although they haven’t let Anti-People’s break aneighth yet. They have it pegged at 106, but there is an ugly rumour justin that Bob, under cover of a general attack, is unloading Anti-People’son to the Reinhart wing for Rogers and Rockefeller, and the rumour isgetting in its work. Even Barry Conant is growing a bit anxious. Thelatest talk is that Reinhart is borrowing hundreds of millions onAnti-People’s, and that his loans are being called in all directions. Doyou know Reinhart is at his place in Virginia and cannot get here beforeto-morrow night? If Bob breaks through Anti-People’s peg, it will be theworst crash yet.”

“All right, Fred,” I answered. “I will go over to Bob’s right now. I hateto do it, but there is no other hope.”

I dropped the receiver and started for Bob’s office. As I went through hiscounting-room one of the clerks said, “They have just broken Anti-People’sto 90 on a bulletin that Tom Reinhart’s wife and only daughter have beenkilled in an automobile accident at their place in Virginia. They firsthad it that Reinhart himself was killed. That has been corrected, althoughthe latest word is that he is prostrated.”

I rapped on Bob’s private-office door. I felt the coming struggle as Iheard his hoarse bellow, “Come in.” He stood at the ticker, with the tapein one hand, while with the other he held the telephone receiver to hisear. My God, what a picture for a stage! His magnificent form was erect,his feet were as firmly planted as if he were made of bronze, hisshoulders thrown back as if he were withstanding the rush of the StockExchange hordes, his eyes afire with a sullen, smouldering blaze, his jawwas set in a way that brought into terrible relief the new, hard lines ofdesperation that had recently come into his face. His great chest wasrising and falling as though he were engaged in a physical struggle; hisperfect-fitting, heavy black Melton cutaway coat, thrown back from thechest, and a low, turned-down, white collar formed the setting for athroat and head that reminded one of a forest monarch at bay on themountain crag awaiting the coming of the hounds and hunters.

I hesitated at the threshold to catch my breath, as I took in theterrific figure. Had Bob Brownley been an enemy of mine I should havebacked out in fear, and I do not confess to more than my fair share ofcowardice. Inwardly I thanked God that Bob was in his office instead of onthe floor of the Exchange. His whole appearance was frightful. He showedin every line and lineament that he was a man who would hesitate atnothing, even at killing, if he should find a human obstacle in his roadand his mind should suggest murder. He was the personification of the mostawful madness. Even when he caught sight of me, he hardly moved, althoughmy coming must have been a surprise.

“So it is you, Jim Randolph, is it? What bringsyou here?” His voice washoarse, but it had a metallic ring that went to my marrow. Bob Brownley inall the years of our friendship had never spoken to me except in kind andloving regard. I looked at him, stunned. I must have shown how hurt I was.But if he saw it, he gave no sign. His eyes, looking straight into mine,changed no more than if he had been addressing his deadliest enemy.

Again his voice rang out, “What brings you here? Do you come to pleadagain for that dastard Reinhart after the warning I gave you?”

I clenched both hands until I felt the nails cut the flesh of my palms. Iloved Bob Brownley. I would have done anything to make him happy, wouldwillingly have sacrificed my own life to protect his from himself orothers, but this madman, this wild brute, was no more Bob Brownley as Ihad known him than the howling northeast gale of December is the gentle,welcome zephyr of August; and I felt a resentment at his brutal speechthat I could hardly suppress. With a mighty effort I crushed it back,trying to think of nothing but his awful misery and the Bob of our collegedays.

I said in a firm voice, “Bob, is this the way to talk to me in your ownoffice?” At any time before, my words and tone would have touched hisall-generous Southern chivalry, but now he said harshly—“To hell withsentiment. What——” He did not take his eyes from mine, but they told methat he was listening to a voice in the receiver. Only for a second; thenhe let loose a wild laugh, which must have penetrated to the outer office.

“Eighty and coming like a spring freshet,” he said into the mouthpiece,“and the boys want to know if I won’t let up now that Reinhart is down?Go back and smother them with all they will take down to 60. That’s myanswer. Tell them if Reinhart had ten more wives and daughters and theywere all killed, I’d rend his bastard trust to help him dull his sorrow.Give the word at every pole that I will have Reinhart where he will cursehis luck that he was not in the automobile with the rest of his tribe——

“To hell with sentiment!” He was speaking to me again. “What do you want?If you are here to beg for Reinhart and his pack of yellow curs, you’vegot your answer. I wouldn’t let up on that fiendish hyena, not if his wifeand daughter and all the dead wives and daughters of every ‘System’ mancame back in their grave clothes and begged. I wouldn’t let up a share.” Igasped in horror.

“When did those robbers of men and despoilers of women and children everlet up because of death? When were they ever known to wait even till thecorpse stiffened to pluck out the hearts of the victims? It is my turnnow, and if I let up a hair may I, yes, and Beulah, too, be damned,eternally damned.”

I could not stand it. If I stayed, I, too, should become mad. I reachedfor the doorknob, but before I could swing the door open Bob was upon melike a wolf. He grasped me by the shoulders and with the strength of amadman hurled me half across the room. I sank into a chair.

“No, you don’t, Jim Randolph, no, you don’t. You came here for somethingand, by heaven, you will tell me what it is! You know me; you are the onlyhuman being who does. You know what I was, you see what I am. You knowwhat they did to me to make me what I am. You know, Jim Randolph, you knowwhether I deserved it. You know whether in all my life up to the day thosedollar-frenzied hounds tore my soul, I had done any man, woman, or child awrong. You know whether I had, and now you are going to sneak off andleave me as though I were a cur dog of the Reinhart-‘Standard Oil’ breedgone mad!”

He was standing over me, a terrible yet a magnificent figure. As he hurledthese words at me, I was sure he had really lost his mind; that I was inthe presence of a man truly mad. But only for an instant; then my horror,my anger turned to a great, crushing, all-consuming agony of pity forBob, and I dropped my head on my hands and wept. It is hard to admit it,but it is true—I wept uncontrollably. In an instant the room was quietexcept for the sound of my own awful grief. I heard it, was ashamed of it,but I could not stop. The telephone rang again and again, wildly, shrilly,but there was no answer. The stillness became so oppressive that even myown sobs quieted. I gasped as the lump in my throat choked me, then Islowly raised my eyes.

Bob’s towering figure was in front of me. His head had fallen forward, andhis arms were folded across his breast. But that he stood erect I shouldhave thought him dead, so still was he. I jumped to my feet and lookedinto his face, down which great tears were dropping silently. I touchedhim on the shoulder.

“Bob, my dear old chum, Bob, forgive me. For God’s sake, forgive me forintruding on your misery.”

I looked at him. I will never forget his face. No heartbroken woman’scould have been sadder. He slowly raised his head, then staggered andgrasped the ticker-stand for support.

“Don’t, Jim, don’t—don’t ask me to forgive you. Oh, Jim, Jim, my oldfriend, forgive me for my madness; forget what I said to you, forget thebrute you just saw and think of me as of old, when I would have pluckedout my tongue if I had caught it saying a harsh word to the best andtruest friend man ever had. Jim, forget it all. I was mad, I am mad, Ihave been mad for a long time, but it cannot last much longer. I know itcan’t, and, Jim, by all our past love, by the memories of the dear olddays at St. Paul’s and at Harvard, the dear old days of hope andhappiness, when we planned for the future, try to think of me only as youknew me then, as you know that I should now be, but for the ‘System’s’curse.”

The clerks were pounding on the door; through the glass showed many forms.They had been gathering for minutes while Bob talked in his low, sad tone,a tone that no one could believe came from the same mouth that a fewmoments before had poured forth a flood of brutal heartlessness.

Bob went to the door. The office was in an uproar. Twenty or thirty ofBob’s brokers were there, aghast at not getting a reply to their calls.Many more were pouring in through the outer office. Bob looked at themcoldly. “Well, what is the trouble? Is it possible we are down to a pointwhere the Stock Exchange rushes over to a man’s office when his wirehappens to break down?”

They saw his bluff. You cannot deceive Stock Exchange men, at least notthe kind that Bob Brownley employed on panic days, but his coolnessreassured them, and when they saw me it was odds-on that they guessed to aman why Bob had ignored his wires—guessed that I had been pleading forthe life of “the Street.”

“Well, where do you stand?”

Frank Swan answered for the crowd: “The panic is in full swing. She’s acellar-to-ridge-pole ripper. They’re down 40 or over on an average.Anti-People’s is down to 35, and still coming like sawdust over a brokendam. Barry Conant’s house and a dozen other of Reinhart’s have gone under.His banks and trust companies are going every minute. The whole Streetwill be overboard before the close. The governing committee has justcalled a meeting to see whether it will not be best to adjourn theExchange over to-day and to-morrow.”

Bob listened as if he had been a master at the wheel in a gale, receivingreports from his mates.

There was no trace now of the scene he had just been through. He was cool,masterful, like the seasoned sea-dog who knows that in spite of theocean’s rage and the wind’s howl, the wheel will answer his hand and thecraft its rudder. “Jim, come over to the Exchange.” The crowd followedalong. “We have but a minute and I want to have you say you forgive me,”he said to me. “I know, Jim, you understand it all, but I must tell youhow sorrowful I am that in my madness I should have so forgotten myadmiration, respect, and love for you, yes, and my gratitude to you, as tosay what I did. I’ll do the only thing I can to atone. I will stop thispanic and undo as much as possible of my work; and now that I have wreckedReinhart I am through with this game forever, yes, through forever.”

He pressed my hand in his strong, honest one and strode into the Exchangeahead of the crowd. All was chaos, although the trading had toned down toa sullen desperation. So many houses, banks, and trust companies hadfailed that no man knew whether the member he had traded with early inthe day would on the morrow be solvent enough to carry out his trades. Theman who had been “long” in the morning, and had sold out before the crash,and who thought he now had no interest in the panic, found himself withhis stock again on hand, because of the failure of the one to whom he hadsold, and the price cut in two. The man who was “short” and who a fewminutes before had been eagerly counting his profits now knew that theyhad been turned to loss, because the man from whom he had borrowed hisshort stocks for delivery would be in no condition to repay for them, thenext day, when they should be returned to him. The “short” man washimself, therefore, “long” stocks he had bought to cover his “short” sale.In depressing the price he had been working against his own pocket insteadof against the bulls he had thought he was opposing. All was confusion andblack despair. There is, indeed, no blacker place than the floor of theStock Exchange after a panic cyclone has swept it, and is yet lingering inits corners, while the survivors of its fury do not know whether or not itwill again gather force.

Chapter IX.

The Governing Committee was holding a meeting in its room. Bob rushed inunceremoniously.

“One word, gentlemen,” he called. “I have more trades outstanding, bothbuys and sells, than any other member or house. Before deciding whether toadjourn in an attempt to save ‘the Street’, I ask your consideration ofthis proposition: If the Exchange will suspend operations for thirtyminutes, and allow me to address the members on the floor, I will agree tobuy stocks all around the room, until they have regained at least halftheir drop—all of it, if possible. I will buy until I have exhausted tothe last hundred my fortune of a billion dollars. This should make anadjournment unnecessary. I know that this is a most extraordinary request,but you are confronted with a most extraordinary situation, the mostremarkable in the history of the Stock Exchange. Already, if what they sayon the floor is correct, over two hundred banks and trust companiesthroughout the country have gone under, and new failures are beingannounced every minute. Half the members of this and the Boston andPhiladelphia Exchanges are insolvent and have closed their doors, or willclose them before three o’clock, and the shrinkage in values so farreported runs over fifteen billions. Unless something is done before theclose, there will be a similar panic in every Exchange and Bourse inEurope to-morrow.”

The committee instantly voted to lay the proposition before the fullboard. In another minute the president’s gavel sounded, and the floor wasstill as a tomb. All eyes were fixed on the president. Every man in thatgreat throng knew that upon the announcement they were about to hear,might depend, at least temporarily, the welfare, not only of Wall Street,but of the nation, perhaps even of the civilised world. The presidentspoke:

“Members of the New York Stock Exchange:

“The Governing Committee instructs me to say that Mr. Robert Brownley hasasked that operations be suspended for thirty minutes, in order that he beallowed to address you. Mr. Brownley has agreed, if this request begranted, he will upon resumption of operations purchase a sufficientamount of stock to raise the average price of all active shares at leastone-half their total drop—all of it, if possible. He agrees to buy to thelimit of his fortune of a billion dollars. I now put Mr. Brownley’srequest to a vote. All those in favour of granting it will signify thesame by saying ‘Yes.’”

A mighty roof-lifting “Yes” sounded through the room.

“All those opposed, ‘No.’”

There was a deathly hush.

“Mr. Brownley will please speak from this platform, and remember, inthirty minutes to the second, I will sound the gavel for the resumption ofbusiness.”

Bob Brownley strode to the place just vacated by the president. The crowdwas growing larger every minute. The ticker was already hissing a tapebiograph of this extraordinary situation in brokerage shops, hotels, andbanks throughout the country, and in a few minutes the news of it would bein the capitals of Europe. Never before in history did man have such anaudience—the whole civilised world. Already arose from Wall, Broad, andNew Streets, which surround the Exchange, the hoarse bellow of thegathering hordes. Before the ticker should announce the resumption ofbusiness these would number hundreds of thousands, for the financialdistrict for more than an hour had been a surging mob.

For once at least the much-abused phrase, “He looked the part,” could beused in all truthfulness. As Robert Brownley threw back his head andshoulders and faced that crowd of men, some of whom he had hurt, many ofwhom he had beggared, and all of whom he had tortured, he presented apicture such as a royal lion recently from the jungles and just freed fromhis cage might have made. Defiance, deference, contempt, and pity allblended in his mien, but over all was an I-am-the-one-you-are-the-manyatmosphere of confidence that turned my spinal column into a mercury tube.He began to speak:

“Men of Wall Street:

“You have just witnessed a record-breaking slaughter. I have askedpermission to talk to you for the purpose of showing you how any member ofa great Stock Exchange may at any time do what I have done to-day. Weighwell what I am about to say to you. During the last quarter of a centurythere has grown up in this free and fair land of ours a system by whichthe few take from the many the results of their labours. The men who takehave no more license, from God or man, to take, than have those from whomthey filch. They are not endowed by God with superior wisdom, nor havethey performed for their fellow-men any labour or given to them anythingof value that entitles them to what they take. Their only license toplunder is their knowledge of the system of trickery and fraud that theythemselves have created. No man can gainsay this, for on every side is theevidence. Men come into Wall Street at sunrise without dollars; beforethat same sun sets they depart with millions. So all-powerful has grownthe system of oppression that single men take in a single lifetime all thesavings of a million of their fellows. To-day the people, eighty millionsstrong, are slaving for the few, and their pay is their board and keep. Isaw this robbery. I felt the robbers’ scourge. I sought the secret. Ifound it here, here in this gambling-hell. I found that the stocks webought and sold were mere gambling chips; that the man who had thebiggest stack could beat his opponent off the board; that his opponent wasthe world, because all men directly or indirectly played thestock-gambling game. To win, it was but necessary to have unlimited chips.If chips were bought and sold, on equal terms, by all, no one could buymore than he could pay for, and the game, although still a gambling one,would be fair. A few master tricksters, dollar magicians, long ago seeingthis condition, invented the system by which the people are ruthlesslyplundered. The system they invented was simple, so simple that for aquarter of a century it has remained undiscovered by the world atlarge—and even by you, who profess to be experts. No man thought that afree people who had intended to allow all the equal use of every avenuefor the attainment of wealth, and who intended to provide for thesafeguarding of wealth after it was secured, could be such dolts as toallow themselves to be robbed of all their accumulated wealth by a deviceas simple as that by which children play at blindman’s buff. The processwas no more complex than that employed by the robber of old, who took thepebbles from the beach, marked them money, and with the money bought thelabour of his fellows, and by the manipulation of that labour and byturning pebbles into money he took away from the labourer the money whichhe had paid them for the labour until all in the land were slaves of themoneymaker. These few tricksters said: We will arbitrarily manufacturethese chips—stocks. After we have manufactured them, we will sell theworld what the world can pay for, and then by the use of the unlimitedsupply we still have we will win away from the world what it has bought,and repeat the operation, until we have all the wealth, and the people areenslaved. To do this there was one thing besides the manufacturing of thechips—stocks—that was absolutely necessary—a gambling-hell, the workingof whose machinery would place a selling value upon such chips; a hellwhere, after selling the chips, they could be won back. I saw that ifthese tricksters were to be routed and their ‘System’ was to be destroyed,it must be through the machinery of this Stock Exchange. I studied themachinery, and presently I marvelled that men could for so long have beenasses.

“From the very nature of stock-gambling it is necessary, absolutelynecessary, that it be conducted under certain rules, unchangeable,unbreakable rules, to attempt to change or break which would destroystock-gambling. The foundation rule, the rule absolutely necessary for theexistence of stock-gambling is: Any member of the Stock Exchange can buy,or sell, between the opening and the closing of the Exchange as manyshares of stock as he cares to. With this rule in force his buying andselling cannot be restricted to the amount he can take and pay for, ordeliver and receive pay for, because there is not money enough in theworld to pay for what under this same rule can be bought and sold in asingle session. This is because there have been arbitrarily created bythese few tricksters many times more stocks than there is money inexistence. The amount of stock that any man can sell in one session of theExchange is limited only by the amount that he can offer for sale, and hecan offer any amount his tongue can utter; and he is not compelled andcannot be compelled to show his ability to deliver what he has offered forsale until after he has finished selling, which is the following day. Youwill ask as I did: Can this be possible? You will find the answer Ifound. It is so, and must continue to be so, or there will be nostock-gambling. Mark me, for this statement is weighted with the greatestimport to you all. A member of this Exchange can sell as many shares ofstock at one session as he cares to offer. If any attempt is made at thesession he sells at to compel him either before or after he offers to sellto show his ability to deliver, away goes the stock-gambling structure,because from the very nature of the whole structure of stock-gambling thesame shares are sold and resold many times in each session and the sellercannot know, much less show, that he can deliver until he first adjustswith the buyer and the buyer cannot adjust until after he has become suchby buying. If a rule were made compelling a seller to show hisresponsibility before selling, every member would have every other memberat his mercy and there could be no stock-gambling. When I had worked thisout, I saw that while the few tricksters of the ‘System’ had a perfectdevice for taking from the people their wealth, I had discovered asperfect a means of taking away from the few the wealth they had securedfrom the many. With this knowledge came a conviction that my way was ashonest as the ‘System’s,’ in fact more honest than theirs. They took fromthe innocent, I took from the guilty what had already been dishonestlysecured. I determined to put my discovery into practice.

“I might never have done so but for that Sugar panic in which I was robbedof millions by the ‘System’ through Barry Conant. In that panic the‘System,’ with its unlimited resources, filched from the people by thearbitrary manufacture of stocks, and by their manipulation did to me whatI afterward discovered I could do to them, without any resources otherthan my right to do business on the floor of this Exchange. You saw theoutcome, in the second Sugar panic, of my first experiment. In a fewminutes I cleared a profit of ten million dollars. I could have made itfifty millions, or one hundred and fifty, but I was not then on familiarterms with my new robber-robbing device, and I had yet a heart. To makethis ten millions of money, all that was necessary for me to do was tosell more Sugar than Barry Conant could buy. This was easy, because BarryConant, not knowing of my newly invented trick, could buy only what hecould pay for on the morrow, or, at least, what he believed his clientscould pay for; while I, not intending to deliver what I sold—unless bysmashing the price to a point where I could compel those who had bought toresell to me at millions less than I sold at—could sell unlimitedamounts—literally unlimited amounts. When Barry Conant had bought allthat he thought he could pay for, he was obliged to beat a retreat infront of my offerings, and I was able to smash, and smash, until the pricewas so low that he could not by the use of what he had bought, ascollateral, borrow sufficient to pay me for what I had sold him. Then hewas compelled to turn about and sell what he had bought from me, and whenI had rebought it, for ten millions less than I had sold it for, the trickhad been turned. I had sold him 100,000 shares say at 220. He had soldthem back to me say at 120, and he stood where he had stood at thebeginning. He had none of the 100,000 shares. Both of us stood, so far asstock was concerned, where we had stood at the beginning, but as toprofits and losses there was this difference: I had ten millions ofdollars profits, while Barry Conant’s clients, the ‘System,’ were tenmillions losers—and all by a trick. The trick did not differ inprinciple from the one in constant practice by the ‘System.’ When the‘System,’ after manufacturing Sugar stock, sell 100,000 shares to thepeople for $10,000,000, they so manipulate the market by the use of the$10,000,000 that they have taken from the people as to scare them intoselling the 100,000 shares back to them for $5,000,000. After they havebought they again manipulate the market until the people buy back for$10,000,000 what they sold for $5,000,000. The ‘System’ commits no legalcrime. I committed no legal crime. I had not even infringed any rule ofthe Exchange, any more than had the ‘System’ when they performed theirtrick. Since my experimental panic I have repeatedly put the trick inoperation, and each time I have taken millions, until to-day I have in mycontrol, as absolutely as though I had honestly earned them, as thelabourer earns his week’s wages, or the farmer the price of his crops,over $1,000,000,000, or sufficient to keep enslaved the rest of theirlives a million people.

“What do you intelligent men think of this situation? You know, becauseyou know the stock-gambling game, that the American people, with theirboasted brains and courage, come year after year with their bags of gold,the result of their prosperous labours, and dump them, hundreds ofmillions, into this gambling-inferno of yours. You know that they arefools, these silly millions of people whom you term lambs and suckers. Youchuckle as, year after year, having been sent away shorn, they return fornew shearing. You marvel that the merchants, manufacturers, miners,lawyers, farmers, who have sufficient intelligence to gather such surpluslegitimately, would bring it to our gambling-hell, where upon all sides isplain proof that we who conduct the gambling, and who produce nothing, areobliged to take from those who do produce, hundreds of millions each yearfor expenses, and hundreds of millions each year for profits—for you knowthat we have nothing to give them in return for what they bring to us. Youknow that every dollar of the billions lost in Wall Street means higherprices for steel rails, for lumber and cars, and that this means higherpassenger and freight rates to the people. You know that when themanufacturer brings his wealth to Wall Street and is robbed of it, hewill add something to the price of boots and shoes, cotton and woollenclothes, and other necessities that he makes and that he sells to thepeople. You know that when the copper, lead, tin, and iron miners partwith their surplus to the ‘System,’ it means higher prices to the peoplefor their copper pots and gutters, for the water that comes through leadpipes, for their tin dippers and wash boilers, and for their rents, andall those necessities into which machinery, lumber, and other raw andfinished material enters. You know that every hundred millions dropped byreal producers to the brigands of our world means lower wages or less ofthe necessities and luxuries for all the people, and especially for thefarmer. You know that it is habit with us of Wall Street to gloat over thedoctrine of the ‘System,’ which the people parrot among themselves, thedoctrine that the people at large are not affected by our gambling,because they, the people, having no surplus to gamble with, never comeinto Wall Street. And yet, knowing all this, you never thought, with allyour wisdom and cynicism, that right here in this institution, which youown and control, was the open sesame, for each or all of you, to thosegreat chests of gold that your clients, the ‘System,’ have filled tobursting from the stores of the people. What, I ask, do you wise men thinkof the situation as you now see it?”

There was an oppressive stillness on the floor. The great crowd, which nowcontained nearly all the members of the Exchange, listened with bulgingeyes and open mouths to the revelations of their fellow member. From timeto time, as Bob Brownley poured forth his shot and shell of deadly logic,from the vast mob that now surrounded the Exchange rose a hoarse bellow ofimpatience, for few in that dense throng outside could understand thesilence of the gigantic human crusher, which between the hours of ten andthree was never before known to miss a revolution except while itsvictims’ hearts and souls were being removed from its gears and meshes.

Bob Brownley paused and looked down into the faces of the breathlessgamblers with a contempt that was superb. He went on:

“Men of Wall Street, it is writ in the books of the ancients that everyevil contains within itself a cure or a destroyer. I do not pretend thatwhat I am revealing to you is to you a cure for this hideous evil, but Ido say that what I am giving you is a destroyer for it, and that while itwill be to the world a cure, it may leave you in a more fiery hell thanthe one of which you now feel the flames. I do not care if it does. When Iam through, any member of the New York Stock Exchange who feels the ironin his soul can get instant revenge and unlimited wealth. You who areturning over in your minds the consideration that your great body can makenew rules to render my discovery inoperative, are dealing with a shadow.There is no rule or device that can prevent its working. There are onethousand seats in the New York Stock Exchange. They are worth to-day$95,000 apiece, or $95,000,000 in all. Their value is due to the fact thatthis Exchange deals in between one and three million shares a day. Wereany attempt made to prevent the operation of my invention, transactionswould because of such attempt drop to five or ten thousand shares per day,or to such transactions as represent stock that will be actually deliveredand actually paid for. To make my invention useless it must be madeimpossible to buy or sell the same share of stock more than once at onesession, and short selling, which is now, as you know, the foundation ofthe modern stock-gambling structure, must likewise be made impossible. Ifthis could be done the $95,000,000 worth of seats in the Exchange would beworth less than five millions, and, what is of far greater import to allthe people, the financial world would be revolutionised. Men of WallStreet, do not fool yourselves. My invention is a sure destroyer of thegreatest curse in the world, stock-gambling.”

A sullen growl rose from the gamblers. Robert Brownley glared down hisdefiance.

“Let me show you the impossibility of preventing in the future anyone’sdoing what I have done to you so many times during the past five years.All the capital required to work my invention is nerve and desperation, ornerve without desperation. It is well known to you that there are at alltimes Exchange members who will commit any crime, barring perhaps murder,to gain millions. Your members have from time to time shown nerve ordesperation enough to embezzle, raise certificates, give bogus checks,counterfeit stocks and bonds, and this for gain of less than millions, andwhen detection was probable. All these are criminal offences and theirdetection is sure to bring disgrace and State prison. Yet members of thisExchange desperate enough to take the chance, when confronted with loss offortune and open bankruptcy, have always been found with nerve enough toattempt the crimes. I repeat that there are at all times Exchange memberswho will commit any crime, barring perhaps murder, to gain millions. Thatyou may see that my successors will surely come from your midst from timeto time during the future existence of the Exchange, I will enumerate thedifferent classes of members who will follow in my footsteps:

“First, the ‘In Gold We Trust’ schemer who is of the ‘System’ type, butwho is outside the magic circle. A man of this class will reason: I knowscores of men, who stand high on ‘the Street’ and in the social world, whohave tens of millions that they have filched by ‘System’ tricks, if not bylegal crimes. If I perform this trick of Brownley’s, the trick of sellingshort until a panic is produced, I shall make millions and none will bethe wiser. For all I know, many of the multi-millionaires whom I have seenproduce panics and who were applauded by ‘the Street’ and the press fortheir ability and daring, and whose standing, business and social, is nowthe highest, were only doing this same thing, and having been successful,they have never been detected or suspected. But even suppose I fail, whichcan only be through some extraordinary accident happening while I amengaged in selling, I shall have committed no crime, and, in fact, shallhave done no one any great moral wrong, for if I fail to carry out mycontract to deliver the stock I have sold in trying to produce a panic,the men to whom I have sold will be no worse off for not receiving whatthey bought; in fact they will stand just where they stood before Iattempted to bring on a panic.

“Second, if an Exchange member for any reason should find himselfoverboard and should realise that he must publicly become bankrupt andlose all, he surely would be a fool not to attempt to produce a panic,when its production would enable him to recoup his losses and prevent hisfailure, and when if by accident he should fail in his attempt to producea panic, the penalty would simply be his bankruptcy, which would havetaken place in any event.

“The third class is that large one that always will exist while there isstock-gambling, a class of honest, square-dealing-play-the-game-fair-Exchangemen who would take no unfair advantage of their fellow-members until theybecome awakened to the knowledge that they are about to be ruined by theirfellow-members’ trickery.

“Next, let us consider further whether it is possible for our Exchange toprevent my device from being worked, now that it is known to all. Supposethe Governing Committee was informed in advance that the attempt to workthe trick was to be made. If, at any session, after gong-strike, theGoverning Committee, or any Exchange authority, could for any reasoncompel a member to cease operating, even for the purpose of showing thathis transactions were legitimate, the entire structure of stock-gamblingwould fall. Think it through: Suppose a man like Barry Conant or myself,or any active commission broker, begins the execution of a large order fora client, one, say, who has advance information of a receivership, a fireat a mine, the death of a President, a declaration of war, or any of thehundred and one items of information that must be acted upon instantly,where a delay of a minute would ruin the broker, or his house, or itsclients. If the Governing Committee could thus call the broker to account,the professional bear or the schemer, who desired to prevent him fromselling, would have but to pass the word to the president of the Exchangethat the broker in question was about to work Brownley’s discovery and hecould be taken from the crowd and before he returned his place could betaken by others and he could be ruined.

“Men of Wall Street, it is impossible to prevent the repetition of thoseacts by which in five years I have accumulated a billion dollars,impossible so long as a short sale or a repurchase and resale, is allowed.When short sales, and repurchases and resales, are made impossible, stockspeculation will be dead. When stock speculation is dead, the people canno longer be robbed by the ‘System.’ In leaving you, the Exchange, andstock-gambling forever, as I shall when I leave this platform, I will sayfrom the depth of a heart that has been broken, from the profoundity of asoul that has been withered by the ‘System’s’ poison, with a full senseof my responsibility to my fellow-man and to my God, that I advise everyone of you to do what I have done and to do it quickly, before the doingof it by others shall have made it impossible, before the doing of it byothers shall have blown up the whole stock-gambling structure. Inaccepting my advice you can quiet your conscience, those of you who haveany, with this argument: ‘If I start, I am sure of success. If I succeed,no one will be the wiser. The millions I secure I will take from men whotook them from others, and who would take mine. The more I and otherstake, the sooner will come the day when the stock-gambling structure willfall.’

“The day on which the stock-gambling structure falls is the day for whichall honest men and women should pray.”

Bob Brownley paused and let his eyes sweep his dumfounded audience. Therewas not a murmur. The crowd was speechless.

Again his eyes swept the room. Then he slowly raised his right hand withfist clenched, as though about to deal a blow.

“Men of Wall Street”—his voice was now deep and solemn—“to show thatRobert Brownley knew what was fitting for the last day of his career, hehas revealed to you the trick—and more.

“Many of you are desperate. Many of you by to-morrow will be ruined. Thetime of all times for such to put my trick in practice is now. The victimof victims is ready for the experiment. I am he. I have a billion dollars.With this billion dollars I am able to buy ten million shares of theleading stocks and to pay for them, even though after I have bought theyfall a hundred dollars a share. Here is your chance to prevent your ruin,your chance to retrieve your fortune, your chance to secure revenge uponme, the one who has robbed you.”

He paused only long enough for his astounding advice to connect with hislistener’s now keenly sensitive nerve centres; then deep and clear rangout, “Barry Conant.” The wiry form of Bob’s old antagonist leaped to therostrum.

“I authorise you to buy any part of ten million shares of the leadingstocks at any price up to fifty points above the present market. There ismy check-book signed in blank, and I authorise you to use it up to abillion dollars, and I agree to have in bank to-morrow sufficient funds tomeet any checks you draw. You have failed to-day for seven millions, and,therefore, cannot trade, but I herewith announce that I will pay all theindebtedness of Barry Conant and his house. Therefore he is now in goodstanding.” Bob had kept his eye on the great clock; as the last wordpassed his lips, the President’s gavel descended.

With a mighty rush the gamblers leaped for the different poles. BarryConant with lightning rapidity gave his orders to twenty of hisassistants, who, when Bob Brownley called for Conant, had gathered aroundtheir chief. In less than a minute the dollar-battle of the age was on, abattle such as no man had ever seen before. It required no supernaturalwisdom for any man on the floor to see that Bob Brownley’s seed had fallenin superheated soil, that his until now secret hellite was about to betested. It needed no expert in the mystic art of deciphering the wallhieroglyphics of Old Hag Fate to see that the hands on the clock of the“System” were approaching twelve. It needed no ear trained to hear humanheart and soul beats to detect the approaching sound of onrushing doom tothe stock-gambling structure. The deafening roar of the brokers that hadbroken the stillness following Robert Brownley’s fateful speech hadawakened echoes that threatened to shake down the Exchange walls. Thesurging mob on the outside was roaring like a million hungry lions in anArbestan run at slaughter time.

Chapter X.

The instant after the gong sounded Bob Brownley was alone on the floor atthe foot of the president’s desk. His form was swaying like a reed on theedge of the cyclone’s path. I jumped to his side. His brother, who hadduring Bob’s harangue been vainly endeavouring to beat his way through thecrowd, was there first. “For God’s sake, Bob, hear me. Word came from yourhouse half an hour ago of the miracle: Beulah has awakened to her past.Her mind is clear; the nurses are frantic for you to come to her.”

He got no further. With a mad bellow and a bound, like a tortured bullthat sees the arena walls go down, Bob rushed out through the nearestdoor, which, I thanked God, was a side one leading to the street where thecrowd was thinnest. He cast a wild look around. His eyes lighted on anempty automobile whose chauffeur had deserted to the crowd. It was thework of a second to crank it; of another to jump into the front seat.Quick as had been his movement, I was behind him in the rear seat. With abound the great machine leaped through the crowd.

“In the name of Christ, Bob, be careful,” I yelled, as he hurled the ironmonster through the throng, scattering it to the right and left as themower scatters the sheaves in the wheat fields. Some were crushed beneathits wheels. Bob Brownley heard not their screams, heard not the curses ofthose who escaped. He was on his feet, his body crouched low over thesteering-wheel, which he grasped in his vise-like hands. His hatless headwas thrust far out, as though it strove to get to Beulah Sands ahead ofhis body. His teeth were set, and as I had jumped into the machine I hadnoted that his eyes were those of a maniac, who saw sanity just ahead ifhe could but get to it in time. His ears were deaf not only to the howl ofthe terrified throng and the curses of the teamsters who franticallypulled their horses to the curb, but to my warnings as well. He swung themachine around the corner at New Street and into Wall as though it hadbeen the broadest boulevard in the park. He took Wall Street at a bound Iwas sure would land us through the fence into Trinity’s churchyard. Butno. Again he turned the corner, throwing the Juggernaut on its outsidewheels from Wall Street into Broadway as the crowds on the sidewalk heldtheir breath in horror. I, too, was on my feet, but crouching as I hung tothe sides. Thank God, that usually crowded thoroughfare was free fromvehicles as far up as I could see, on beyond the Astor House. What couldit mean? Was that divinity which ’tis said protects the drunkard and theidiot about to aid the mad rush of this love-frenzied creature to hislong-lost but newly returned dear one? I heard the frantic clang of gongs,and as we shot by the World Building, I saw ahead of us two plungingautomobiles filled with men. ’Twas from them the gong clamour sounded. Aswe drew nearer. I saw that these were the cars of the fire chiefsanswering a call. I thanked God again and again as I yelled into Bob’sear, “For Beulah’s sake, Bob, don’t pass; if you do, we’ll run into ablockade. If we keep in the rear they’ll clear our way, and we may get toher alive.” I do not know whether he heard, but he held the machine in therear of the other cars and did not try to pass. Away we went on our madrush through crowded Broadway. At Union Square we lost our way-clearers.As our automobile jumped across Fourteenth Street into Fourth Avenue, Bobmust have opened her up to the last notch, for she seemed to leap throughthe air. We sent two wagons crashing across the sidewalks into thebuildings. Cries of rage arose above the din of the machine, and seemed tofollow in our wake. Bob was dead to all we passed. His entire being seemedset on what was ahead. I knew he was an expert in the handling of theautomobile, for since his misfortune, automobiling with Beulah Sands hadbeen his favourite pastime, but who could expect to carry that plunging,swaying car to Forty-second Street! Bob seemed to be performing thewondrous task. We shot from curb to curb and around and in front ofvehicles and foot passengers as though the driver’s eyes and hands wereinspired.

Across the square at last and on up Fourth Avenue to Twenty-sixth Street.Then a dizzying whirl into Madison. Was he going to keep to it until hegot to Forty-second Street and try to make Fifth Avenue along thatcongested block with its crush of Grand Central passengers and lines uponlines of hacks and teams? No. His head must be clear. Again he threw thegreat machine around the corner and into Fortieth Street. For a part ofthe block our wheels rode the sidewalk, and I awaited the crash. It didnot come. Surely the new world Bob was speeding to must be a kind one,else why should Hag Fate, who had been at the steer-wheel of his life-carduring the last five years, carry him safely through what looked a dozensure deaths? Without slacking speed a jot we swung around the corner ofFortieth into Fifth Avenue. The road was clear to Forty-second; there adense jam of cars, teams, and carriages blocked the crossing. Bob musthave seen the solid wall for I heard his low muttered curse. Nothing elseto indicate that we were blocked with his goal in sight. He never touchedthe speed controller, but took the two blocks as though shot from acatapult. The two? No, one, and three-quarters of the next, for whenwithin a score of yards of the black wall he jammed down the brakes, andthe iron mass ground and shook as though it would rend itself to atoms,but it stopped with its dasher and front wheels wedged in between a carand a dray. It had not stopped when Bob was off and up the avenue like ahound on the end-in-sight trail. I was after him while the astonishedbystanders stared in wonder. As we neared Bob’s house I could see peopleon the stoop. I heard Bob’s secretary shout, “Thank God, Mr. Brownley, youhave come. She is in the office. I found her there, quiet and recovered.She did not ask a question. She said, ‘Tell Mr. Brownley when he comesthat I should like to see him.’ Then she ordered me to get the afternoonpaper. I handed it to her an hour ago. I think she believes herself in herold office. I shut off the floor as you instructed. I did not dare go toher for fear she would ask questions. I have”—but Bob was up the stairstwo and three steps at a time.

My breath was almost gone and it took me minutes to get to the secondfloor. My feet touched the top stair, when, O God! that sound! For fivelong years I had been trying to get it out of my ears, but now moreguttural, more agonised than before, it broke upon my tortured senses. Idid not need to seek its direction. With a bound I was at the threshold ofBeulah Sands-Brownley’s office. In that brief time the groans hadstilled. For one instant I closed my eyes, for the very atmosphere ofthat hall moaned and groaned death. I opened them. Yes, I knew it. Thereat the desk was the beautiful gray-clad figure of five years ago. Therethe two arms resting on the desk. There the two beautiful hands holdingthe open paper, but the eyes, those marvellous gray-blue doors to animmortal soul—they were closed forever. The exquisitely beautiful facewas cold and white and peaceful. Beulah Sands was dead. The hell-hounds ofthe “System” had overtaken its maimed and hunted victim; it had added herbeautiful heart to the bags and barrels and hogsheads stored away in itsbig “business-is-business” safe-deposit vaults. My eyes in sick pitysought the form of my old schoolmate, my college chum, my partner, myfriend, the man I loved. He was on his knees. His agonised face was turnedto his wife. His clasped hands had been raised in an awful, heart-crushingprayer as his Maker touched the bell. Bob Brownley’s great brown eyes wereclosed, his clasped hands had dropped against his wife’s head, and indropping had unloosed the glorious golden-brown waves until in fondabandon they had coiled around his arms and brow as though she for whomhe had sacrificed all was shielding his beloved head from the chills anddark mists of the black river that laps the brink of the eternal rest. The“System” had skewered Robert Brownley’s heart too. I staggered to hisside. As I touched his now fast-icing brow my eyes fell upon the greatblack headlines spread across the top of the paper that Beulah Sands hadbeen reading when the all-kind God had cut her bonds:

FRIDAY THE THIRTEENTH

And beneath in one column:

TERRIBLE TRAGEDY IN VIRGINIA

THE RICHEST MAN IN THE STATE, THOMAS REINHART, MULTI-MILLIONAIRE, WHILE TEMPORARILY INSANE FROM THE LOSS OF HIS WIFE AND DAUGHTER, AND OF HIS ENORMOUS FORTUNE, WHICH WAS SHATTERED IN TO-DAY’S AWFUL PANIC, CUT HIS THROAT. HIS DEATH WAS INSTANTANEOUS.

In another column:

ROBERT BROWNLEY CREATES THE MOST AWFUL PANIC IN HISTORY, AND SPREADS WRECK AND RUIN THROUGHOUT THE CIVILISED WORLD.

Publisher’s Note

The following are fac-similes of a few of the letters received by theauthor during the serial publication of “Friday, the Thirteenth.”

RESIDENCE OF
THE PAULIST FATHERS
2158 PINE STREET

San Francisco, CA 21 October 1906

My Dear Mr. Lawson
    Kindly allow one of your countless admirers to express his extremegratification with the announcement that you will add fiction to yourdistinguished literary achievements. Your gifts as a writer are so wonderfuland fascinating that I look forward eagerly to your work in this newfield—and I pray God to prosper you in all good.

Sincerely,
John Marus Haudly

70 Kirkland St., Cambridge
Dec. 26, 1906.

Mr. T. W. Lawson,

Boston, Mass.

My Dear Sir: Allow me to congratulate you on your last move and on your story,“Friday, the Thirteenth”.
    It is the best yet, not merely as a story but as an eye opener. I can beginto see daylight in spots, where it looks like a remedy and a real one. Ican’t see how you will work it; but I think I do get a hint, and it holdsme tightly.
    That story ought to be issued in a cheap (25¢) edition in paper, andevery man in American ought to read it. The third part is yet to come; but, ifI mistake not, it will make us all say “Hurrah!” In this form thefacts go home. They were too abstract before. Now they live and palpitate.Sincerely yours,

[Illegible: H. W. Majorson]

Dowagiac, Mich., Dec 26, 1906.

Mr. T. Lawson,
Boston, Mass.

Dear Sir—
    I have just finished reading your second installment of “Friday the13th.” It is one of the greatest stories I ever read. Your previousarticles are good, but this is a wonder. I believe you are sincere and cannothelp admiring your wonderful courage + grit in going up against big odds. Ihave no axe to grind with you, simply think that no matter how big you may beyou like to know that what you write is appreciated by the majority of goodamerican citizens. So Here’s to you Mr Lawson + I back you to eventuallywin. Smash ’em good.

Yours Truly
A. J. Hill.

Grinnell, Iowa, Nov. 3 1906

Thomas Lawson
Boston, Mass.

Dear Sir,
    What did “Bob” hear when he picked up the receiver. Impossibleto wait one month to find out.

Yours truly,
A. W. Talbott

103 Stedman Street
Brookline Mass.

Dear Mr. Lawson:—

I have hit just read the first instalment of your serial “Friday the13th.”
    I was so interested, aroused and stirred, I felt I must express to yousome of the appreciation I feel for the work you have done and are doing.
    The army of those who suffer is so great the human spoilers so strong;that one’s heart goes out in gratitude to a champion who comes around andable willing to do better for the oppressed.
    Would it be an intrusion to extend sympathy to one bereft of the beautifulgift of loving companionship? I hope that it is sincerely felt.
    Many admire and rejoice in your work—may it go forward bringing theknowledge which is power to ever increasing numbers of American people.

Most Sincerely
Marion E. Major

December 14th, 1906

L. GUY DENNETT
ATTORNEY AT LAW
48 TREMONT ST., BOSTON
TELEPHONE CONNECTION

Nov. 21/06

Thomas W. Lawson Esq.
Boston, Mass.

Dear Sir,
    I take it for granted that you want to know how the “Public” isgoing to take to your latest writing “fiction” and how are you toknow unless your unknown friends write you?
    I have read every thing you have ever written because I believe in you andadmire the work you have done and are doing and allow me to say that I finalybelieve that you will one day be recognized as one of the greatest storywriters of the age. The first section of “Friday the Thirteenth”has convinced me that you will be a sure winner.

Yours very truly,
L. Guy Dennett

Angola Tulare Co. Cal.
Dec. 29, 1906

W. T. Lawson,

Dear Sir,
    I wanted to thank you for the first number of “Friday the13th”, but did not know your address. “Everybody’s”contains some letters written you to Boston so hope this may reach itsdestination.
    I live in the wildest of the wooley west + such a god send as in“Everybody’s” (sent me by a sister in Oakland Cal.) +containing the first number of your story, words inadequately suffices. Fridaythe 13th made an impression on me which I could not easily shake off if Iwould. I was so sorry it ended where it did that I wanted to cry out + couldhardly wait for the Jan. number. Yesterday I bought one in Hanford Cal. rode 30miles north to get it. I live a mile from the recently filled in basin of oldTulare Lake. The snowfall on the mountains argue that our part of the Wild +Wooley may soon be a fishing station instead of an alfalfa ranch.
    Perhaps you don’t understand how much your story is appreciated.
    You are Bob Brownley,I know. Can you reallyfeel what youwrite as you make us do? Your characters appeal to me so that I live with them,every nerve alert to the straining point (but with pleasure). You are certianlythe idol of the American people. I’ve heard you discussed by rich + poor,monopolist + antimonopolist during the publication of “FrenziedFinance” + the worst a monopolist could say was that you were as bad asthe Standard Oil, but wanted to get even. “What is that but avirtue,” exclaimed I. “Couldn’t he have made millions bystaying in, buthe recognized his past failings and exposedthem S.O. to uphold a nation. May honor attend him. Isn’t thatbeing a man and a gentleman?”
    People read “Frenzied Finance” to a man + would loan themagazine one to another so those who felt the 15¢ impossible could get thegood of your revelations.
    I’m glad you believe in sentiment—the heart-lasting sentiment(instead of dollars and desire) which I feared was becoming a thing of thepast; There are still splendid men in America. God bless them.
    O happy New Year may the weight of your pen sway millions. Amen.

Respectfully,
Louise D. Tennent

See 14 Kings
Angola P.O.
Ca.

Spokane, Wash.
December 28. 1906.

Mr. Thomas W. Lawson,
Boston, Mass.

Dear Sir:
    I have lived nine years in Anaconda, Montana, and therefore become somewhatfamiliar with amalgamated copper, etc. I want to say I have followed yourwritings with lively interest and have sworn by all the statements you havemade. It is, therefore, with the greatest regret that I am compelled to statethat my faith in you has been shattered.
    When you state in your story of “Friday the 13th” that theheroine walked in to an office in New York in the middle of July with a featherturban on her head I simply cannot swallow it. That a lady of refinement andgood taste with $30,000 in the bank, and anxious to make a good appearance,should walk into an office in New York with a winter hat taxes my credulity tothe breaking point. However, be that as it may, I want to say that you havemade a big fight against great odds and that I admire your pluck and genius,and I hope you will keep right on fighting for the right.
    By the way, I might as well admit that it was my wife by the way is asuperior woman who called my attention to the turban when I was reading yourstory aloud to her. I am,

Very truly yours,
John Ortson

O’Fallon, Ill. Nov. 22nd, 1906

Thos W. Lawson
Boston, Mass.

Dear Sir,
    It has afforded me great pleasure to just have finished your firstinstallment to “Friday the 13th,” as have also your previouswritings, from which I learned a great deal,—although from a financialstandpoint, following what I thought to be your advice, I am several thousanddollars looser,—and I take this means of contributing my mite ofencouragement, firmly believing that your work is doing a great good, andtrusting that success on the lines you have mapped out, will be your reward.

Very respectfully,
Wm. A. Staney.

(I’m awaiting your next installment)

Dear sir:
    I have only had the pleasure of meeting you once—in your private car,with Thayer, when you were returning from your western trip—but I hopeyou will not consider me presuming if I take a moment of your valuable time tothank you for your masterpiece just begun in Everybody’s.
    Such magic has not flowed from a pen for many a year.

Yours Truly
John O Powers

206 North 34th Street
Philadelphia

Des Moines, Iowa, 11/20, 1906

Mr. Thos. Lawson
Boston.

Dear Sir,
    I like your story “Friday the Thirteenth.” For the informationand added knowledge your previous writing has given me I thank you.
    —“for the crow that is in him and the spurs that are on him toback up the crow with.” You certainly are a game and competant oldfighter.

Sincerely, with best wishes
[Illegible signature: A. S. Goodman]

St. Paul, Minn.,
November 26, 1906.

Mr. Thomas W. Lawson,
Boston,
Mass.

Dear Sir:
    I wish to congratulate you on the good story you wrote in Everybody’sMagazine this month. It is the beat story I ever read and the best I eversaw published in any magazine.
    I am well posted on the “Brokers” business and enjoyed your story verymuch. I hope you will continue to write them. I know they are taken morefrom real life than immagination. I am sure they will be appreciated asmuch as “Frenzied Finance”. I have taken the liberty to send a good wordto Ridgway’s.

With best wishes, I remain
Yours respectfully,

Western Union Telegraph Co.
R.A. Kelly

Los Angeles, Calif.,
December 11, 1906.

Mr. Thomas W. Lawson,
Boston, Mass.

My dear Sir:
    It was indeed a pleasure to read your novel in this month’sEverybody’s. Being an old trader myself, I have appreciated every word ofit and look forward for the continuation with much interest.
    I just want to say this too—that anyone who says that you cannotwrite anything else but “Street” gossip had better cover his“shorts”.
    Wishing you all kinds of success, and with congratulations on your splendidwork, I am

Very sincerely,
Nancy Brown
214 Citizens Nat’l Bank Bldg.

Washington, D.C.,
December 1, 1906.

Thos. W. Lawson, Esq.,
Boston,
Mass.

Dear Sir:
    I have just read with very great pleasure and edification the firstinstallment of your excellent story “Friday the 13th”. It is so fara masterpiece.

Congratulating you. I remain
Very truly,
M. H. Ramaze

Cleburn, Texas, Dec 3 1906

Mr. Thos. W. Lawson
Boston

Dear Sirs:
    I have just your first installment of “Friday 13th.” It is OK +if the balance of the story is as good (+ I have no doubts on that score) youare “It” when it comes to writting fiction as well as tricking theInsurance Thief + Standard Oil Grafters.

Wishing you success
I am yours very truly
S. F. Welch

Rumford Falls, Maine,
November 20, 1906.

Mr. Tom Lewson,
Boston,
Mass.

Dear Sir:
    I have read all your writings in Everybody’s, including the firstinstallment of your story in the December number, and I must say that I am morethan pleased with it. As a writer of fiction you are sure to make another bighit.

Yours truly,
W. I. White.