Once more he looked up and an expression of deep terror spread over his face. Tears welled into his eyes and he wept for awhile in silence as Hamilton looked on.

"Jeff'son Edwardes's dead," he reiterated with parrot-like singleness of idea. "Mary's heart's broke.... I'm drunk." One hand waved broadly in an oratorical gesture. After a moment he added in solemn afterthought, "Father's drunk, too."

Hamilton ground his teeth. "I suppose," he said bitterly, "you regard the first two facts as justification for the others."

Paul rose and through his condition something of his more normal self asserted itself. He laid his hands on his brother's shoulders.

"Hamilton, I think my heart's broke, too. Mary's a sweet girl. I haven't slept f'r a long, long time--been worrying--an' tonight I--"

"Never mind explaining." Out of the elder brother's voice the wrath had died. "That won't help now. Come, I'll put you to bed."

As he turned away from Paul's bedroom a half-hour later the face of Hamilton Burton was not the face of the conqueror. In his own room he went to a window and looked out. He saw a star and some fancy identified it as the same star that had caught his eye that night when he came back to the farm-house and found his father ill. Once more it was not in the east riding toward the upper heavens, but in the west, setting beyond the Palisades of Jersey--soon to drop from view.

For a breathing-space Hamilton Burton felt faint and uncertain, as one may feel in a dream which is half-wakefulness.

Then he was conscious of his own voice speaking half-aloud:

"Slivers Martin paid me ten for 'em an' I got 'em for seven--an' he had to go after 'em."

The words had come involuntarily--as from another personality speaking with his tongue, and they startled him. With a fiercely impatient gesture he brushed his hand across his forehead and picked up from a table a new appreciation of the life and campaigns of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Yamuro slipped in with his cushioned tread and stood awaiting orders, and after a while the master whose attention refused to remain fixed even on Napoleon glanced up.

"You may go, Yamuro," he said in a wearied voice, but the Japanese valet did not go. Instead he approached and his face grew anxious as he noted the confused and fatigued droop of his master's eyes and lips.

"'Scuse, please," he hazarded as his white teeth flashed in an apologetic grin. "You tired. You go down gymnasium--take ex'cise--one half-hour. Yes, one half-hour and me rub you Japanese way; make you sleep--yes, please."

Hamilton Burton raised his head slowly. "Perhaps," he acceded in a dull voice, "that mightn't be a bad idea. I do feel a bit fagged--for some reason--and I need to be fit tomorrow. Tomorrow will be a decisive day."

So with the narrow-eyed little servitor in whose breast beat a heart of unquestioning loyalty, the untriumphant victor went down into the basement of his house, where between marble slabs and porphyry columns he had equipped a small gymnasium finished with the magnificence of a Roman bath.

Beyond an arched portal was another room where the basin of a swimming-pool spread cool and inviting between mosaic floors.

Here each morning Hamilton plunged into the icy water and came out with a splendid vitality glowing on his firm flesh. But at night he used only the warm shower and when they came into the gymnasium they did not touch the switch which lighted the pool.

Then Hamilton Burton stripped and attacked the punching bag until his muscles glistened and shone as if they had been freshly oiled. Yamuro stood looking on with sparkling eyes. Hamilton Burton stripped and in action would have brought a glow of delight to the face of those Hellenic masters of training who saw in the human body the most sacred temple of the human soul, and paid tribute to physical perfection. The flow and ripple of these strong, justly modeled sinews were like the play of steel under satin and their smoothness was as rhythmic and full of power as some young gladiator's, who might have stirred the appreciation of Phidias or Praxiteles. When at last he had burned his mental restlessness into physical weariness, Burton halted and stood with his shoulders thrown back and his head erect, the breathing of chest and abdomen as regular and deep as the sequence of waves at flood tide. Yamuro went out into still another room for the accessories of his Japanese art of muscle-kneading, and Hamilton turned idly toward the darkened swimming pool. He strolled over to the edge of the marble basin and walked out on the spring-board. It was all very dark in here, but his feet were familiar with every foot of space.

"I might as well cap it with a plunge," he told himself, and, lifting his hands above his head, launched outward in a graceful arc.

Yamuro came back a moment later and looked about the empty gymnasium.

His face suddenly went pale. "Mr. Burton--please!" he screamed, and in his excitement his voice was more than ordinarily sibilant. Then he turned on the pool light and rushed frantically back. It had not occurred to him to warn his chief that that afternoon the basin had been emptied and repaired, and that below the diving-board were only six inches of water--just enough to give back, in semi-darkness, a liquid reflection, and, beneath that, solid slabs of marble.

Yamuro peered over the edge and a deep groan broke from him. At the bottom lay the figure of Hamilton Burton, with its head bent to one side. It lay very still, and the water was slowly coloring from a wound in the scalp.

CHAPTER XXV

Hamilton Burton had always denied with scorn the existence of blind luck as an element in human greatness or failure. Now if he had leaped head-foremost into an empty swimming pool, at the exact moment when he stood midway of an enterprise which should crown him as omnipotent--or ruin him, perhaps it was a thing beyond coincidence. Yesterday he had aligned colossal forces for today's conflict--and taken his toll of vengeance. Today he must turn to profit the chaos he had wrought to that end through plans known only to himself--and today he lay with a fractured skull, sleeping the sleep of unconsciousness.

Today every hand in the world of finance was turned against him with the desperation of a struggle for survival--save those of his own lieutenants who were leaderless. All the way down the line from the Department of Justice to the small sufferers of the provinces a slogan of war without quarter sounded against the most hated man in America.

That such would be the case he had known yesterday, but he also knew--or thought he did--that his directing hand would still be on the tiller and his uncannily shrewd brain would be puzzling, bewildering and deluding his enemies into unwittingly serving his ends.

From the morning papers the secret of his accident had been successfully withheld. So the press of the country sounded forth a united thunder-peal of stinging and bitter anathema, pillorying Hamilton M.

Burton as the most menacing of all public enemies and an ogre who had in a single day fattened his already superlative wealth on the sufferings, the starvation and the lives of his victims. Editorial pages from Park row to a thousand main streets, double-leaded and double-columned their clamorous demand that such a plunderer should be nailed to the cross of punishment. Burton-phobia was epidemic. At first the physicians who gathered in his darkened room would not commit themselves to any promise of recovery. The skull was fractured. Ahead lay a long illness at best--after that--but here they left off words and resorted to a non-committal shrugging of frock-coated shoulders.

"Do you mean," Elizabeth Burton put the question with trembling lips and chalk-white cheeks, "that perhaps--even if he gets physically well--"

She, too, broke off.

"Frankness is best," responded the family physician, who feeling the most personal responsibility, assumed the hard role of spokesman.

"Sometimes in cases of this sort the brain is left--with a permanent scar upon its efficiency."

The mother groaned. At her own house lay a daughter in that collapse which had followed the overtaxed courage of the first shock. Here lay Hamilton, her oldest; her Napoleonic boy for whose condign punishment a nation's voice cried out. To her they were simply her children, equally dear.

Only one child was left her in his proper condition of mind and body.

He, because of his sensitive, almost clairvoyant nature, had always been very close to her. Now she turned to Paul, and Paul, although his heart was shaken with terror and distress, rose for the time beyond his weakness and was almost a man as he sought to brace his mother's need.

From her first interview with the doctors she went to the music-room and, pausing on the threshold, heard him at the piano. He was singing very low.

"If I were hanged to the highest tree--Mother o' mine, Mother o' mine, I know whose prayers would come up to me--Mother o' mine."

She went in and Paul took her in his arms and helped her to a chair.

Then as he had used to do when a little boy he knelt down, gazing into her face while she talked, and she reached out a hand which was much thinner since her own late illness and ran it through the dark hair over his white forehead. For a merciful little moment it seemed to this grief-stricken woman that she was no longer white-haired and beautifully gowned. In her fancy the fingers with their wealth of rings were again red with the drudgery of the washtub and the head she caressed was the head of a little boy, who, because he was delicate and shrinking, found a greater delight here at her knee than in the rougher companionship of playmates. Paul spoke softly.

"Ham"--it had been a long time since he had used that abbreviated name.

Perhaps he, too, had slipped back into the past--"Ham will get well--and work more miracles, mother. He won't surrender even to death. His spirit, and his star, will bring him through."

"I almost wish," her words were faint, "he had never had a star. I wish that we were all back there, close to the strength of the hills and the graves of our dead."

In these days Paul was very constantly with his mother, and by a thousand little attentions made himself indispensable to her.

It was a small thing, but costly to his feelings, since, for every one of these moments redolent of suffering and sadness, his own soul fiber, delicate and thin as a silk thread, must afterward pay in the reaction of a deep depression. To him echoes meant more than positive sounds, and the tears in his mother's voice, the unshed tears in her eyes, brought him a suffering so intense and genuine that when he went out the thought of returning to either of the stricken houses where she needed him was like returning to a jail. Then, too, there was the unexpressed fear which gnawed incessantly at his heart, that, in spite of his belief in Hamilton, business disaster might lie ahead. He wrote less often and with more effort to Loraine Haswell--and thought longingly of Marcia Terroll, who had forbidden him to see her.

Such a pregnant item of news as Hamilton Burton's accident could not long be kept from the Street and the public. On the morning following the occurrence it burst into print--and for a time the chorus of invective was silenced.

But the hands that had been raised to pull him down could not be stayed.

He himself had never halted when the Gods of Chance had tossed into his lap a mighty advantage. At the first announcement that "Ursus Major" lay ill, perhaps mortally hurt, the trampled prices of securities began to revive like dusty blossoms under a shower. Day long came damp extras from the press heralding a bull day almost as wild and swift in its price recovery as yesterday's bear day had been terrific in its avalanche.

From post to post the deep voice of Len Haswell and other Burton lieutenants thundered in an effort to stem the altered tide--but they were generals of brigade without their field marshal, guessing blindly at a plan which had not been revealed by the master-tactician. Into the eyes of Jack Staples stole a glitter of premonitory triumph as he met them and beat them back. Burton millions were melting like hailstones falling on hot metal, and when the session ended Len Haswell turned away with an empty face. For two days he had almost forgotten, in his battle-lust, his own heart-ache. Now it was over and because he had followed Hamilton Burton with his own small fortunes as a camp-follower trails an army corps, he knew that he was wiped out and ruined. Hamilton might lose many millions, and "come back," but he and many like him were irretrievably done for.

One day when Hamilton had been ill for a week and had not yet emerged from the distorted land of delirium, Tom Burton strolled, as immaculate and well groomed as ever, into the National Union Club, and looked about for a bridge quorum of his cronies. The doctors held out hope and the father sought relaxation from anxiety. His face was flushed, for old Thomas Burton, too, had felt sorely the strain of these days, and had sought his own means of dulling apprehension's edge. His brain was not versatile in such matters.

General Penfrit occupied his customary chair by a Fifth-avenue window, and the newcomer smiled with pleasure to find him there. General Penfrit shared many interests with him, and was willing to share as many more, so long as Thomas Burton's bridge game continued to be of the contributory type.

Burton strolled over, swinging his stick, and nodded with a bland smile, but to his dismay the general glanced up and acknowledged the greeting without warmth. Perhaps his old friend was not feeling well today.