Railway Generals had closed yesterday strong at 175, but quotations from London, where by reason of difference in time there had already been several hours of trading, reflected an unaccountable nervousness over-seas. So the stock opened five points off.

Every game has its traditional rules. It is a cardinal by-law of the Exchange that until the gong peals every man on the floor must maintain an unruffled and blase composure, though when the clamor of the big bell unleashes their restraint whosoever chooses may leap into the frenzy of a madhouse.

A voice at the Railway-Generals post drawled out "170 for any part of 5,000 Generals," and on the instant Hardinge's deep basso boomed a challenge and a battle cry as he yelled back, "Sold!"

The bidder was Jack Staples, and he bore the credentials of J.J. Malone.

For just an instant he eyed his vis-a-vis and his prominent lower jaw seemed to protrude more aggressively, as his indolent manner dropped from him and his eyes kindled. He brushed back the white lock on his forehead and defiantly shouted, "168 for any part of 10,000," but before the words had come to conclusion on his lips, the rifle-like retort had met him from the throat of Hardinge, "Sold!"

"165 for any part of 10,000!"--"Sold!" This time the deep-lunged monosyllable burst volcanically from the lips of Len Haswell, and it rang across the floor and echoed between the walls like a thunderclap between the cliffs of a mountain gorge.

Instantly crowds surged forward and elbowed their ways to the Generals post. Where five minutes back there had been scant dozens there were now full hundreds who shouldered and shoved and fought, struck by a sudden wild realization that a fight was on. At the center of the vortex they could see the sandy head of Len Haswell high above the crowns of other men and in his face they read the gage of battle. No longer was this the heartsick face which of late had avoided the gaze of his fellows. It was the fighting face of one who hurls himself into the thick of a struggle, seeking forgetfulness in the ferocity of combat.

"163 for any part of 10,000"--"SOLD!"

With each repetition the unchanged formula took on an added ferocity--a deeper meaning. It was a three-cornered duel. Jack Staples leaned eagerly forward, his eyes burning and keen with aggressive alertness like a boxer facing opponents in a battle royal. Len Haswell seemed bending to meet him, his long arm raised and his face afire, while Hardinge, whose place had been for the moment preempted, mopped his brow, already perspiring, and smiled grimly like a relay racer waiting his turn.

But what gave an undercurrent of terrific force to the battle of these three men was the thing which every broker present understood--that one of them was the floor spokesman of Malone and Harrison and the old invincible order of Consolidated--and that two voiced the message of the new power and in the name of Hamilton Burton were declaring a war to the death.

"160 for any part of 20,000"--"SOLD!"

Generals had broken fifteen points in ten minutes and were slumping as though their foundations floated in thin air. A yell went up over the floor through which sounded demoniac notes of panic and rage. Men surged around the Generals post, struggling as cowards might struggle to leave a burning theater, collars tore loose and eyes glittered like those of a wolf-pack. The blackboards at north and south burst into a hysterical flashing of white numbers, and a word went out which set the cylinders of printing presses whirling. A Burton bear raid was on, and the Street was in panic-making excitement!

But close around the post three figures still dominated the picture.

Staples with his tigerish teeth to the crowd fought the two men who carried Burton's orders and who with implacable monosyllables still hammered the market with sledges of mighty resource. What had been the orderly floor of an artistically designed mart of trade was now a hell of pandemonium. With the sweat pouring down his face, his hands clenched above his head, and his deep voice strained into a hoarse bellow, Jack Staples of Consolidated fought as a man fights death, to breast and stem and turn the tidal wave of disaster.

Other stocks followed suit, and while Haswell, forgetting in his excitement that he had been officially superseded, crouched face to face, battering his opponent, Hardinge fought his way like a madman out of the maelstrom and declared war on Coal and Ore. Voices blended into a frenzied Walpurgian uproar. Frantic telephone calls made the blackboard one flickering, wavering, confusing area of black and white where no spot was white for any consecutive minute and no spot black.

For an hour it raged so, down!--down!--down!--with no moment of recovery and no instant of changing tide. When now and again the din subsided for a few moments of recovered breath, while traders "verified," faces streaming sweat looked as haggard as though it was blood that was pouring from them. Voices cracked with hoarseness as men stood panting like dogs torn from the embrace of battle and waiting only for the leash to loosen and free them again for renewed battle. Underfoot they trod the confetti-like scraps of torn papers. Among them went the men with green watering-pots. Outside newsboys called yet new extras. The market had been open an hour and the Street was seeing the most delirious day of mania in its history. Then in one of the lulls came that sound which between the hours of ten and three is never heard save as the clarion of disaster. The great gong in the president's gallery sent out its strident and metallic voice, and in the dead silence that followed its command an announcement was made.

"The Western Trust Company announces that it cannot meet its obligations."

The weakest barrier had fallen, and it was only the beginning.

CHAPTER XXIII

When Mary Burton presented herself in the anteroom of the suite whose ground-glass doors bore the legend "Edwardes and Edwardes," and asked for the banker, a man with a pale and demoralized face gazed at her blankly. Could any one seek to claim, except on most urgent business, one minute out of these crucially vital hours? They were hours when the real target of the whole panic-making bombardment was striving to compress into each relentless instant a separate struggle for survival.

"I am Mary Burton," she said simply; and the man stood dubiously shaking his head. His nerve-racked condition could only realize the name Burton--and in these offices it was not just now a favored name.

As he stood, barring the way to an inner room marked "private," the door opened and Jefferson Edwardes came hurriedly out. He looked as she had never seen him look before, for deep lines had seared themselves into his face, aging it distressingly, and the mouth was drawn as that of a man who has been called back from the margin of death. But his eyes held an unwavering fire and his jaw was set in the pattern of battle. Mary remembered a painting of a solitary and wounded artilleryman leaning against a shattered field gun amid the bodies of his fallen comrades.

The painter had put sternly into the face an expression of one who awaits death, but denies defeat. Here, too, was such a face. The man, hastening out, halted suddenly. Then he stepped back into his own office, silently motioning her to follow.

"It has come," he told her quietly. "We should have expected it, yet we were taken by surprise. Today tells a grim story."

"What does it all mean?" she pleaded. She stood close with her face almost as dead white as the ermine that fell softly about her shoulders.

"I read the papers--and I came at once--to be near you in these hours.

What does it mean?"

"I can't explain now," he answered in the quick utterance of one to whom time is invaluable. "Now every minute may mean millions--even human lives and deaths. I told you that he must trample down the innocent and the ignorant to come within striking distance of me. He is doing it. The bottom has dropped out of everything--pandemonium reigns. Each minute is beggaring hundreds--each half-hour is sending old houses to the wall and shattering public confidence. By this afternoon the country will be in the lockjaw paralysis of panic--unless we can stem the tide. Will you wait here for me? I must go to Malone."

"And there is nothing I can do--nothing?" Her voice was agonized and, with his hand on the knob, he abruptly wheeled and came back. He caught her fiercely in his arms and held her so smotheringly to his breast that her breath came in gasps. She clung to him spasmodically and the lips that met his were hot with a fever of fear and love. "Nothing I can do,"

she whispered, "though I am--the Helen who brought on the war?"

"Yes," he spoke eagerly, passionately, and she could feel the muscles in his tensed arms play like flexible steel as her hands dropped to rest inertly upon them. "Yes, there is something you can do--something you are doing! You are giving me a strength beyond my own strength to fling myself on these wolves and beat them back. You are giving me a battle-lust and a hope.... Now I must go."

She released him and forced a smile for his departure, then sank into a chair--his chair by a paper-littered desk--and her eyes, very wide and fixed, gazed ahead--at first unseeing. Yet, after an interval they began to take in this and that detail of the place, where she had never been before.

This was his office, the workshop in which he carried on his affairs and the affairs of the concern which had its foundation in unshaken ideals and high honor. In an intangible fashion its inanimate accessories reflected something of himself. On one wall, from a generous spread of moose antlers, hung a rifle and a pair of restrung snowshoes: reminders of the open woods he loved. There were autographed portraits of many men whose names were names of achievement, and one, in a morocco frame surmounted by a gilt crown, attested the personal regard of a reigning monarch. With clenched hands and a grim determination to divert her mind from the danger of madness, she went about the walls, reading those brief tributes to the man she loved. Then she came back and picked up a gold frame which rested on his desk, where, as he worked, his eyes might never be long without its view--and she was gazing into her own eyes.

She glanced out across the steep-walled, fog-reeking canons where Finance has its center and whence its myriad activities palpitate through arteries of masonry and nerves of wire. He was out there somewhere, in the maw of that incalculably destructive machine, fighting its determination to grind him between its wheels and cogs and teeth. Mary Burton shuddered and tried by the pressure of her fingers to still the violent throbbing of her temples.

Then her eyes began absently studying the inscriptions on the windows of the next building, beyond an intervening court, and she smothered an impulse to scream as a sign across several broad panes flared at her in goldleaf.

"Hamilton Montagu Burton." A bitter fascination held her gaze there. She saw offices teeming with the fevered activity of a beehive--and another window showed a room where the electric lamps shone on emptiness. After she had watched it for a time a solitary figure came into view and stood by the ledge looking out. It was her brother, and though, through the gray fog, he was silhouetted there against the light at his back, something in the posture revealed his mood of Napoleonic implacability.

It was as though he were, from an eminence, actually viewing the battle whose secret springs his fingers controlled, and as though he were well pleased.

Jefferson Edwardes had hurried out with a feeling of renewed strength.

It was to him as though a promise of hope had been vouchsafed in a moment of despair. At Malone's office, he met Harrison, Meegan and several others. The old lion of the Street himself was slamming down the telephone as the newcomer entered.

"I've been talking with Washington," he announced, and his voice was one of steel coolness. At such an hour as this Malone wasted no minim of strength in futile anger. That belonged to other moments. "We have done what we could. It is not enough. We must do more. We have pegged those stocks where the slump would be most demoralizing and already this highbinder, Burton, has smashed those pegs like match-stems. We have sent money to a dozen banks that seemed hardest pressed, and scores are sending out calls for help. Good God, gentlemen, it's like sweeping back the sea with brooms."

"Why did you send for me?" demanded Edwardes, though he knew.

"To ask your aid," came the crisp reply. "This is a general alarm. The next few hours will roar to the continuous crash of falling banks--many of them banks that have a close relationship to you, Edwardes. Once more we must go to the rescue and it will take fifty additional millions.

Otherwise--panic unparalleled. We expect you to stand your pro rata."

"Gentlemen," said the latest comer bluntly, "this raid is primarily aimed at me--its principal object is my destruction. Already I am hit for millions. I, too, was about to call for help from you. When this succession of crashes comes, Edwardes and Edwardes may be among the ruins."

The bushy brows of Malone came together in astonishment. "Great heavens, man! Edwardes and Edwardes is a synonym for Gibraltar."

"And under heavy enough artillery--" Edwardes spoke with bitter calmness--"Gibraltar would be a synonym for scattered junk. What news from Washington?"

"Washington has called Burton on the telephone. The Secretary of the Treasury has failed to connect with him. He does not acknowledge telegrams. He is ignoring the government and treating the President with contempt. He wants to have today for his massacre--and to talk about it tomorrow. We have sent repeatedly to his office. He can't be reached."

"That effort may as well be dropped." Edwardes shrugged his shoulders wearily. "He will have his day--and leave tomorrow to itself."

"And by the Immortal!" For an instant a baleful fire leaped into Malone's face. "We will have tomorrow! Every sinew of American finance shall be strained against him. But tomorrow may be too late. Can you hold out?"

Edwardes smiled grimly. "I'm trying like all hell," he said. "I've not laid down yet."

It was two o'clock and the Stock-Exchange was a shambles. Every security in the Street was down to panic figures and plunging plummet-like to further depths. At shortening intervals over the hoarse shrieks of the floor's tumult boomed the brazen hammer blows of the huge gong, which should sound only twice each day. At every recurring announcement of failure a wall-shaking howl went up and echoed among the sixty-two inverted golden blossoms of the ceiling.

The faces of the men to whom these cracked and hoarsened voices belonged had become bestial and wolfish. Where the morning had seen well-groomed representatives of Money's upper caste, the afternoon saw a seething mass of human ragamuffins, torn of clothing, sweat-drenched and lost to all senses save those twin emotions of ferocity and fear. Back and forth they swirled and eddied, and howled like wild things about carrion. At one side, panting, disheveled and bleeding from scratches incurred in the melee, bulked the gigantic figure of Len Haswell. He had no need now to bellow in a bull-like duel of voices and ferocity. The stampede had been so well put into motion that the floor was doing for him his deadly work of price-smashing. Telegraph wires were quivering from every section of the United States to the tune of--"Sell--cut loose--throw over!" A universal mania to get any price for anything was sweeping the land like a conflagration. Tomorrow would bring those reflexes from today when banks and trust companies from the Lakes to the Rio Grande would topple in the wake of their metropolitan predecessors. Ruin sat crowned and enthroned, monarch of the day and parent of a panic which should close mills, and starve the poor and foster anarchy--but Hamilton Burton's hand was nearer Edwardes' throat.