"Just about, sir."

"Jump in."

"I'm so frightened! Telephone at once!" He heard Doris cry, and, hardly heeding her he looked about vacantly. Then something was pressed in his hand, and Patsie's voice was sounding in his ears. "Here's your bag. I packed it. Keep up your courage, Bojo!"

"Patsie, you're a dear. Thank you. All right now!" He took her hands, met her clear brave eyes, and sprang into the sleigh. A terrible sickening dread came over him, an unreasoning superst.i.tious dread. He felt ruin and worse, cold and damp in the air about him, ruin inevitable from the first, the bubble's collapse as he waved a hasty farewell and shot away in the race across the night.

CHAPTER XIV

THE CRASH

"What has happened?" he asked himself a hundred times during the headlong drive. A corner in Pittsburgh & New Orleans--that was possible but hardly probable. But if a corner had taken place it meant ruin, absolute ruin--and worse. The thought was too appalling to be seized at once. He rea.s.sured himself with specious explanations. There might be a flurry; Gunther and his crowd, who were in control of the system, might have attempted a division to support their property; but the final attack at which Joseph Skelly had hinted more than once as timed for the coming week, the throwing on the market of 100,000 shares--200,000 if necessary--must overwhelm this support, must overwhelm it. What was terrible, though, was the unknown--to be hours from New York, cut off from communication, and not to know what was this shapeless dread.

When they swung into Jenkinstown, orange lights from the windows cut up the s...o...b..und streets in checkerboard patterns of light and shade: an organ was beginning in mournful ba.s.s from a shanty church; a cheap phonograph in a flickering ice-cream parlor was grinding out a ragged march. Through the windows, heavy parties still at the Sunday newspapers were gathered under swinging lamps. The cutter drew up by the hovel of a station and departed, leaving him alone in the semi-darkness, a prey to his thoughts. A group returning after a day's visit trudged past him, laughing uproariously, Slavic and brutish in type, the women in imitated finery, gazing at him in insolent curiosity. He began to walk to escape the dismal sense of unlovely existence they brought him. Beyond were the mathematical rows of barracks--other brutish lives, the bleak ice-cream parlor, the melancholy of the evening service. It was all so one-sided, obsessed by the one idea of labor, lacking in the simplest direction toward any comprehension of the enjoyment of life.

The crisis he had reached, the threatened descent from the sublime to the ridiculous, brought with it that contrition which in men is a superst.i.tious seeking for the secret of their own failures in some transgressed moral law. His own life all at once seemed cruelly selfish and gluttonous before this bleak view of the groping world and, profoundly stirred to self-a.n.a.lysis, he said to himself:

"After all--why am I here--to try and change all this a little for the better or to pa.s.s on and out without significance?" And at the thought that year in and year out these hundreds would go on, doomed to this stagnation, there woke in him a horror, a horror of what it must mean to fall back and slip beneath the surface of society.

He arrived in New York at three in the morning, after an interminable ride in the jolting, wheezing train, fervently awake in the dim and draughty smoking-car where strange human beings huddled over a greasy pack of cards or slept in drunken slumber. And all during the lagging return one thought kept beating against his brain:

"Why didn't I close up yesterday--yesterday I could have made--" He closed his eyes, dizzy with the thought of what he could have netted yesterday. He said to himself that he would wind up everything in the morning. And there would still be a profit, there was still time ...

knowing in his heart that disaster had already laid its clutching hand upon his arm. The city was quiet with an unearthly, brooding quiet as he reached the Court, where one light still shone in the window of a returned reveler. Marsh and DeLancy came hurriedly out at the sound of his entrance.

"What's wrong?" he cried at the sight of Fred's drawn face.

"Everything. The city's full of it," said Marsh. "It leaked out this afternoon, or rather the Gunther crowd let it leak out. Pittsburgh & New Orleans will declare an additional quarterly dividend to-morrow."

"It's the end of us," said Fred. "The stock will go kiting up."

"We've got to cover," said Bojo.

"In a crazy market? If we can!"

"It may not be true."

"I've got it as direct as I could get it," said Marsh, shaking his head.

"Suppose there is a corner and we have to settle around 100 or 150?"

said DeLancy, staring nervously away.

There was no need for Bojo to ask how deeply involved they were. He knew.

"Some one's been buying large blocks of it. That's known," said Marsh, calmer than the rest. "Ten to one it's Gunther's crowd. They had the advance information. Ten to one they've laid the trap and sprung a corner."

"No, nonsense! It's not as bad as that. If they're putting out an extra dividend, the stock's going to jump up--for a while. That's all. And then some one else may have a card up his sleeve," said Bojo, fighting against conviction.

"Call up Drake," said Fred.

Bojo hesitated. The situation called for any measure. He went to the telephone, after long minutes getting a response. Mr. Drake was out of town on a hunting trip; was not expected back until the following night.

There remained Drake's agent Skelly, but a quick search of the book revealed no home telephone.

"Can you put up more margin?" asked Bojo.

DeLancy shook his head.

"I can, but it may be better to take the loss," said Marsh. "We'll have to wait and see. Quick work to-morrow! By the way, there's a call for you from Forshay to be at the office by eight o'clock to-morrow. Well, let's get a few winks of sleep if we can. Luck of the game!"

"I'm sorry," said Bojo desperately.

"Shut up. We're over age," said Marsh, thumping him on the back, but DeLancy went to his room, staring. The moment he was gone Marsh turned to Bojo. "Look here, whatever we do we've got to save Fred. You and I can stand a mauling. Fred's caught."

"If we can," said Bojo, without letting him know how serious the situation was for him. "How deep in is he?"

"Close to 2,000 shares."

"Good heavens, where did he get the money?"

Marsh looked serious, shook his head, and made no further reply.

At seven o'clock, when Bojo was struggling up from a sleepless night, Granning came into his room, awkwardly sympathetic.

"Look here, Bojo, is it as bad as the fellows feared?"

"Can't tell, Granny. Looks nasty."

"You in trouble too?"

Bojo nodded.

"I say, I've got that bond for a thousand tucked away," said Granning slowly. "Use it if it'll help any."

"Bless your heart," said Bojo, really touched. "It's not a thousand, Granny, that'll help now. You were right--gambler's luck!"

"Cut that out," said Granning, shifting from foot to foot. "I'm d.a.m.ned sorry--tough luck, d.a.m.ned tough luck. I wish I could help!"

"You can't--no use of throwing good money after bad. Mighty white of you all the same!"

When he reached the offices, he learned for the first time how deeply the firm had speculated on the information of Drake's intentions.

Forshay was cool, with the calm of the sportsman game in the face of ruin, but Flaspoller and Hauk were frantic in their denunciations. It was a trick, a stock-jobbing device of an inner circle. Nothing could justify an additional dividend. The common stock had not been on a two per cent. basis more than three years. Nothing justified it. Some one would go behind the bars for it! Forshay smoked on, shrugging his shoulders, rather contemptuous.

"Hit you hard?" he said to Bojo.