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Title: Friday, the Thirteenth: A Novel

Author: Thomas William Lawson

Illustrator: Sigismond de Ivanowski

Release date: August 31, 2005 [eBook #12345]
Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

Original publication: Copyright, 1906, . Copyright, . Published, February,,
1907

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12345

Credits: Distributed Proofreaders

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FRIDAY, THE
THIRTEENTH: A NOVEL ***

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

F r i d a y, t h e T h i r t e e n t h
A Novel by

Thomas W. Lawson

Frontispiece in colour by Sigismond de Ivanowski

1907
Copyright, 1906, 1907.
Copyright, 1907.
Published, February, 1907

To Her

I Dedicate This Book
All That Is Good In This Little Waif, Which Is Very
Dear To Me, I Know A Just God Will Place To
Her Credit. All That Is Mean And Low And
Human Could Never Have Been Birthed
Had She Been Nigh To Guide An
Ever Wayward Pen.

The Author.

The Nest, Dreamwold,
August, 1906.

Table of Contents

Chapter I.
Chapter II.
Chapter III.
Chapter IV.
Chapter V.
Chapter VI.
Chapter VII.
Chapter VIII.
Chapter IX.
Chapter X.

Friday, the Thirteenth

Chapter I.

“Friday, the 13th; I thought as much. If Bob has started, there will be
hell, but I will see what I can do.”
The sound of my voice, as I dropped the receiver, seemed to part the
mists of five years and usher me into the world of Then as though it had
never passed on.
I had been sitting in my office, letting the tape slide through my fingers
while its every yard spelled “panic” in a constantly rising voice, when they
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. He
talked with a rush. Stock Exchange floor men in panics never let their
speech hobble.
“Mr. Randolph, it’s sizzling over here, and it’s getting hotter every
second. It’s Bob—that is evident to all. If he keeps up this pace for twenty
minutes longer, the sulphur will overflow ‘the Street’ and get into the banks
and into the country, and no man can tell how much territory will be burned
over by to-morrow. The boys have begged me to ask you to throw yourself
into the breach and stay him. They agree you are the only hope now.”
“Are you sure, Fred, that this is Bob’s work?” I asked. “Have you seen
him?”
“Yes, I have just come from his office, and glad I was to get out. He’s on
the war-path, Mr. Randolph—uglier than I ever saw him. The last time he
broke loose was child’s play to his mood to-day. Mother sent me word this
morning that she saw last night the spell was coming. He had been up to see
her and sisters, and mother thought from his tone he was about to disappear
again. When she told me of his mood, and I remembered the day, I was
afraid he might seek his vent here. Also I heard of his being about town till
long after midnight. The minute I opened his office door this morning he
flew at me like a panther. I told him I had only dropped in on my rounds for
an order, as they were running off right smart, and I didn’t know 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 back to that hell-pit and
sell, sell, sell.’ ‘Sell what and how much?’ I asked. ‘Anything, everything.
Give the thieves every share they will take, and when they won’t take any
more, ram as much again down their crops until they spit up all they have
been buying for the last three months!’ Going out I met Jim Holliday and
Frank Swan rushing in. They are evidently executing Bob’s orders, and
have been pouring Anti-People’s out for an hour. They will be on the floor
again in a few minutes, so I thought it safer to call you before I started to
sell. Mr. Randolph, they cannot take much more of anything in here, and if I
begin to throw stocks over, it will bring the gavel inside of ten minutes; and
that will be to announce a dozen failures. It’s yet twenty minutes to one and
God only knows what will 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
been fingering the tape, watching five and ten millions crumbling from
price values 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
devilish cruelty to rip things as they had been ripped during the last twenty
minutes. The night before I had passed Bob in the theatre lobby. I gave him
close scrutiny and saw the look of which I of all men best knew the
meaning. The big brown eyes were set on space; the outer corners of the
handsome mouth were drawn hard and tense as though weighted. As I had
my wife with me it was impossible to follow him, but when I got home I
called up his house and his clubs, intending to ask, him to run up and smoke
a cigar with me, but could locate him nowhere. I tried again in the morning
without success, but when just before noon the tape began to jump and flash
and snarl, I remembered Bob’s ugly mood, and all it portended.
Fred Brownley was Bob’s youngest brother, twelve years his junior. He
had been with Randolph & Randolph from the day he left college, and for
over a year had been our most trusted Stock Exchange man. Bob Brownley,
when himself, was as fond of his “baby brother,” as he called him, as his
beautiful Southern mother was of both; but when the devil had possession
of Bob—and his option during the past five years had been exercised many
a time—mother and brother had to take their place with all the rest of the
world, for then Bob knew no kindred, no friends. All the wide world was to

him during those periods a jungle peopled with savage animals and reptiles
to hunt and fight and tear and kill.
It is hardly necessary for me to explain who Randolph & Randolph are.
For more than sixty years the name has spoken for itself in every part of the
world where dollar-making machines are installed. No railroad is financed,
no great “industrial” projected, without by force of habit, hat-in-handing a
by-your-leave of Randolph & Randolph, and every nation when entering
the market for loans, knows that the favour of the foremost American
bankers is something which must be reckoned with. I pride myself that at
forty-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 uncle
created, but something to add to its sterling reputation for honest dealing,
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 take but small praise for
this, for the report was about the same the day I left college and came to the
office to “learn the business.” But, as the survivor 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 at over legal rates, 6 per cent, per
annum; have never added to their hoard by any but fair, square business
methods; and that blight of blights, frenzied finance, has yet to find a
lodging-place beneath the old black-and-gold sign that father and uncle
nailed up with their own hands over 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 to entering 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, Northern
horse-sense. The Brownleys were poor as church mice, but they had the
brilliant, virile blood of the old Southern oligarchy and the romantic,
“salaam-to-no-one” Dixie-land pride of before-the-war days, when
Southern prodigality and hospitality were found wherever women were fair
and men’s mirrors in the bottom of their julep-glasses.
Bob’s father, one of the big, white pillars of Southern aristocracy, had
gone through Congress and the Senate of his country to the tune of “Spend

and not spare,” which left his widow and three younger daughters and a
small son dependent upon Bob, his eldest.
Many a warm summer’s afternoon, as Bob and I paddled down the
Charles, and often on a cold, crispy night as we sat in my shooting-box on
the Cape Cod shore, had we matched up for our future. I was to have the
inside run of the great banking business of Randolph & Randolph, and Bob
was eventually to represent my father’s firm on the floor of the Stock
Exchange. “I’d die in an office,” Bob used to say, “and the floor of the
Stock Exchange is just the chimney-place to roast my hoe-cake in.” So
when our college days were over my able had saddled Bob’s youth with the
heavy responsibilities of husbanding and directing his family’s slim
finances that he took to business 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 father summoned us into his office for a sort of tally-up talk.
Neither of us quite 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
eye on both of you and I want you to know that the kind of industry and
business intelligence you have shown here would have won you recognition
in any banking-house on ‘the Street.’ I want you both in the firm—Jim to
learn his way round so he can step into my shoes; you, Bob, to take one of
the firm’s seats on the Stock Exchange.”
Bob’s face went red and then pale with happiness as he reached for my
father’s hand.
“I’m very grateful to you sir, far more so than any words can say, but I
want to talk this proposition of yours over with Jim here first. He knows me
better than any one else in the world and I’ve some ideas I’d like to thrash
out with him.”
“Speak up here, Bob,” said my father.
“Well, sir, I should feel much better if I could go over there into the swirl
and smash it out for myself. You see if I could win out alone and pay back
the seat price, and then make a pile for myself, if you felt later like giving
me another chance to come into the firm, then I should not be laying myself
open to the charge of being a mere pensioner on your friendship. You know
what I mean, sir, and won’t think I am filled with any low-down pride, but
if you will let me have the price of a Stock Exchange seat on my note, and

will give me the chance, when I get the hang of the ropes, to handle some of
the firm’s orders, I shall be just as much beholden 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
what he asked, father insisting on making the seat price in the form of a
present, after explaining to us that a foundation Stock Exchange rule
prohibited an applicant from borrowing the seat price. Four years after Bob
Brownley entered the Stock Exchange he had paid back the forty thousand,
with interest, and not only had a snug fifty thousand to his credit on
Randolph & Randolph’s books, but was sending home six thousand a year
while living up to, as he jokingly put it, “an honest man’s notch.” I may say
in passing, that a Wall Street man’s notch would make twice six thousand
yearly earnings cast an uncertain shadow at Christmas time. Bob was the
favourite of the Exchange, as he had been the pet at school and at college,
and had his hands full of business three hundred days in the year. Besides
Randolph & Randolph’s choicest commissions, he had the confidential
orders of two of the heavy plunging cliques.
I had just passed my thirty-second birthday when my kind old dad
suddenly died. For the previous six years I had been getting ready for such
an event; 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 our business,
so that when anything happens to me there will be no disturbance in ‘the
Street’ in regard to Randolph & Randolph’s affairs. I want to let the world
know as soon as possible that after I am gone our business will run as it
always has. So I will work you into my directorships in those companies
where we have interests and gradually put you into my different
trusteeships.”
Thus at father’s death there was not a ripple in our affairs and none of the
stocks known as “The Randolph’s” fluttered a point because of that, to the
financial world, momentous event. I inherited all of father’s fortune other
than four millions, which he divided up among relatives and charities, and
took command of a business that gave me an income of two millions 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
thousand capital, and I want to feel that I’m free to kick my heels until I

have raked together an even million all of my own making; then I’ll settle
down with you, old man, and hold my handle of the plough, and if some
good girl happens along about that time—well, then it will be ‘An ivy-
covered little cot’ for mine.”
He laughed, and I laughed too. Bob was looked upon by all his friends as
a bad case of woman-shy. No woman, young or old, who had in any way
crossed Bob’s orbit but had felt that fascination, delicious to all women, in
the presence 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 years
married and had two little Randolphs to show that both Katherine Blair and
I knew what marriage was for—never tired of saying, “Poor Bob! He’s
woman-blind, and it looks as though he would never get his sight in that
direction.”
“Then again, Jim,” he continued in a tone of great seriousness, “there’s a
little secret I have never let even you into. The truth is I am not safe yet—
not safe to speak for the old house of Randolph & Randolph. Yes, you may
laugh—you who are, and always have been, as staunch and steady as the
old bronze John Harvard in the yard, you who know Monday mornings just
what you are going to do Saturday nights and all the days and nights in
between, and who always do it. Jim, I have found since I have been over on
the floor that the Southern gambling blood that made my grandfather, on
one of his trips back from New York, though he had more land and slaves
than he could use, stake his land and slaves—yes, and grandmother’s too—
on a card-game, and—lose, and change the whole face of the Brownley
destiny—those same gambling microbes are in my blood, and when they
begin to claw and gnaw I want to do something; and, Jim”—and the big
brown eyes suddenly shot sparks—“if those microbes ever get unleashed,
there’ll be mischief to pay on the floor—sure there will!”
Bob’s handsome head was thrown back; his thin nostrils dilated as
though there was in them the breath of conflict. The lips were drawn across
the white teeth with just part enough to show their edges, and in the depths
of the eyes was a dark-red blaze that somehow gave the impression one gets
in looking down some long avenue of black at the instant a locomotive
headlight rounds a curve at night.

Twice before, way back in our college days, I had had a peep at this
gambling tempter of Bob’s. Once in a poker game in our rooms, when a
crowd of New York classmates tried to run him out of a hand by the sheer
weight of coin. And again at the Pequot House at New London on the eve
of a varsity boat-race, when a Yale crowd shook a big wad of money and
taunts at Bob until with a yell he left his usually well-leaded feet and
frightened me, whose allowance was dollars to Bob’s cents, at the sum total
of the bet-cards he signed before he cleared the room of Yale money and
came to with a white face streaming with cold perspiration. These events
had passed out of my memory as the ordinary student breaks that any hot-
blooded youth is liable to make in like circumstances. As I looked at Bob
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 I was
puzzled. I had regarded my old college chum not only as the best mentally
harnessed man I had ever met, but I knew him as the soul of honour, that
honour of the old story-books, and I could not credit his being 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 him to come into our firm as
a full partner.
Five years later, during which time affairs, business and social, had been
slipping along as well as either Bob or I could have asked, I was preparing
for another sit-down to show my chum that the time had now come for him
to help me in earnest, when a queer thing happened—one of those
unaccountable incidents that God sometimes sees fit to drop across the life-
paths of His children, paths heretofore as straight and far-ahead-visible as
highways along which one has never to look twice to see where he is
travelling; one of those events that, looked at retrospectively, 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 run
down to our place at Newport. As we stepped out of his office one of the
clerks announced that a lady had come in and had particularly asked to see
Mr. Brownley.
“Who the deuce can she be, coming in at this time on Saturday, just when
all alive men are in a rush to shake the heat and dirt of business for food and
the good air of all outdoors?” growled Bob. Then he said, “Show her 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 our
people, 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 had
ever heard, one of those mellow, rippling voices that start the imagination
on a chase for a mocking-bird, only to bring it up at the pool beneath the
brook-fall in quest of the harp of moss and watercresses that sends a
bubbling cadence into its eddies and swirls. Perhaps it was the Southern
accent that nibbled off the corners and edges of certain words and languidly
let others mist themselves together, that gave it its luscious penetration—
however that may be, it was the most no-yesterday-no-tomorrow voice I
had ever heard. Before I grew fully conscious of the exquisite beauty of the
girl, this voice of hers spelled its way into my brain like the breath of some
bewitching Oriental essence. Nature, environment, the security of a perfect
marriage have ever combined to constitute me loyal to my chosen one, yet
as I stood silent, like one dumb, absorbing the details of the loveliness of
this young stranger who had so suddenly swept into my office, it came over
me that here was a woman intended to enlighten men who could not
understand that shaft which in all ages has without warning pierced men’s
hearts and souls—love at first sight. Had there not been Katherine Blair,
wife and mother—Katherine Blair Randolph, who filled my love-world as
the noonday August sun fills the old-fashioned well with nestling warmth
and restful shade—after this interval, looking back at the past, I dare ask the
question—who knows but that I too might have drifted from the secure
anchorage 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 angle of
vision—mere product of lime-light, point of view, desire—but Beulah
Sands’s was beauty beyond cavil, superior to all analysis, as definite as the
evening star against the twilight sky. In height medium, girlish, but with a
figure maturely modelled, charmingly full and rounded, yet by very
perfection of proportion escaping suggestion of “plumpness.” The head,

surrounded and crowned with a wealth of dark golden hair, rested on a neck
that would have seemed short had its slender column sprung less graciously
from the lovely lines of the breast and shoulders beneath. It was on the face,
however, and finally on the eyes that one’s glances inevitably lingered—the
face rose-tinted, with dimples in either of the full cheeks, entering laughing
protest against the sad droop that brought slightly down the corners of a
mouth too large perhaps for beauty, if the coral curve of the lips had been
less exquisitely perfect. The straight, thin-nostriled nose, the broad
forehead, the square, full jaw almost as low at the points where they come
beneath the ears as at the chin, suggested dignity and high resolve coupled
with a power of purpose, rare in woman. The combination of forehead, jaw,
and nose was seldom seen. Had it been possessed by a man it would surely
have driven him to the tented field for his profession. But the greatest glory
of Beulah Sands was her eyes—large, full, very gray, very blue, vivid with
all the glamour of her personality, full of smiles and tears and spirituality
and passion; one instant, frankly innocent, they illuminated the face of a
blonde Madonna; the next, seen through the extraordinary, long, jet-black
eye-lashes underneath the finely pencilled black brows, they caressed,
coquetted, allured. I afterward found much of this girl’s purely physical
fascination lay in this strange blending of English fairness with Andalusian
tints, though the abiding quality of her charm was surely in an exaltation of
spirit of which she might make the dullest conscious. As she stood looking
at Bob in my office that long-ago noon, gracefully at ease in a suit of gray,
with a gray-feathered turban on her head, and tiny lace bands at neck and
wrist, she was very exquisite, exceedingly dainty, and, though Southerner of
Southerners, very unlike the typical brunette girl who comes out of Dixie
land.
This girl who came into our office that July Saturday, just in time to
interfere with the outing Bob Brownley and I had laid out, and who was
destined to divert my chum’s heretofore smooth-flowing river of existence
and turn it into an alternation of roaring rushes and deadly calms, was truly
the most exquisite creature one could conceive of, I know my thought 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
to talk with you on a business matter. I have brought a letter to you from my
father. 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 the earliest minute
possible.”
There was a faint touch of appeal in the charming voice as she spoke that
was irresistible, and we were both willing to forget we had lunch waiting us
on the Tribesman.
“Step into my office, Miss Sands, and all my time is yours,” said Bob, as
he opened the door between his office and mine. After I had sent a note to
my wife, saying we might be delayed for an hour or two, I settled down to
wait for Bob in the general office, and it was a long wait. Thirty minutes
went 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 curiously
intent: “Jim, I have got to talk with you, got to get some of your good
advice. Suppose we hustle along to the yacht and after lunch you tell Kate
we have some business to go over. I don’t want to keep that girl waiting any
longer than possible for an answer I cannot give until I get your ideas.”
After lunch, on the bow end of the upper deck Bob relieved himself.
Relieved is the word, for from the minute he had put Miss Sands into the
carriage until then, it was evident even to my wife that his thoughts were
anywhere but upon our outing.
“Jim,” he began in a voice that shook in spite of his efforts to make it
sound calm, “there is no disguising the fact that I am mightily worked up
about this matter, and I want to do everything possible for this girl. No need
of my telling you how sacred we have got to keep what she has just let me
into. You’ll see as I go along that it is sacred, and I know you will 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 of
Virginia. The Virginia Sands don’t take off their bonnets to another family
in this country, or elsewhere, for that matter, for anything that really counts.
They have had brains, learning, money, and fixed position since 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 go to the bench, the
United States Senate, the House, or the governor’s chair for the starting, and
nearly all of the men folks have held one or all of these honours for
generations. The present judge has held them all. I don’t know him
personally, although my people and his have been thick from away 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 heard mother and
father say is a stalwart, a Virginia stalwart. Being rich—that is, what we
Virginians call rich, a million or so—he has been very active in affairs, and
I knew before his daughter told me, that he was the trustee for about all the
best estates in our part of the country. It seems from what she tells, that of
late he has been very active in developing our coal-mines and railroads, and
that particularly he took a prominent hand in the Seaboard Air Line. You
know the road, for your father was a director, and I think the house has been
prominent in its banking affairs. Now, Jim, this poor girl, who, it seems, has
recently been acting as the judge’s secretary, has just learned that that coup
of Reinhart and his crowd has completely ruined her father. The decline has
swamped his own fortune, and, what is worse, a million to a million and a
half of his trust funds as well, and the old judge—well, you and I can
understand his position. Yet I do not know that you just can, either, for you
do not quite understand our Virginia life and the kind of revered position a
man like Judge Sands occupies. You would have to know that to understand
fully his present purgatory and the terrible position of this daughter, for it
seems that since he began to get into deep water he has been relying upon
her for courage and ideas. From our talk I gather she has a wonderful store
of up-to-date business notions, and I am convinced from 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 State in more ways than one.
“Up to now the girl has stood up to the blow like a man and has been able
to steady the judge until he presents an exterior that holds down suspicion
as to his real financial condition, although she says Reinhart and his
Baltimore lawyer, from the ruthless way they put on the screws to shake out
his holdings in the Air Line, must have a line on it that the judge is
overboard. The old gentleman can keep things going for six months longer
without jeopardising any of the remaining trust funds, of which he has some
two millions, and while his wife, who is an invalid, knows the judge is in
some trouble, she does not suspect his real position. His daughter says that
when the blow came, that day of the panic, when Reinhart jammed the
stock out of sight and scuttled her father’s bankers and partners in the road,
the Wilsons of Baltimore, she had a frightful struggle to keep her father
from going insane. She told me that for three days and nights she kept him
locked in their rooms at their hotel in Baltimore, to prevent him from

hunting Reinhart and his lawyer Rettybone and killing them both, but that at
last she got him calmed down and together they have been planning.
“Jim, it was tough to sit there and listen to the schemes to recoup that this
old gentleman and this girl, for she is only twenty-one, have tried to hatch
up. The tears actually rolled down my cheeks as I listened; I couldn’t help
it; you couldn’t either, Jim. But at last out of all the plans considered, they
found only one that had a tint of hope in it, and the serious mention of even
that one, Jim, in any but present circumstances, would make you think we
were dealing with lunatics. But the girl 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-headed horse-sense of yours will not make you sit down on
it.”
Bob Brownley had got to his feet; he was slipping the shackles of that
fiery, romantic, Southern passion that years in college and Wall Street had
taught him to keep prisoner. His eyes were flashing sparks. His nostrils
vibrated like a deer buck’s in the autumn woods. He faced me with his
hands clinched.
“Jim Randolph,” he went on, “as I listened to that girl’s story of the
terrible cruelty and devilish treachery practised by the human hyenas you
and I associate with, human hyenas who, when in search of dirty dollars—
the only thing they know anything about—put to shame the real beasts of
the wilds—when I listened, I tell you that I felt it would not give me a
twinge of conscience to put a ball through that slick scoundrel Reinhart.
Yes, and that hired cur of his, too, who prostitutes a good family name and
position, and an inherited ability the Almighty intended for more honest
uses than the trapping of victims on whose purses his gutter-born master has
set lecherous eyes. And, Jim, as I listened, a troop of old friends invaded my
memory—friends whom I have not seen since before I went to Harvard,
friends with whom I spent many a happy hour in my old Virginia home,
friends born of my imagination, stalwart, rugged crusaders, who carried the
sword and the cross and the banner inscribed ‘For Honour and for God.’
Old friends who would troop into my boyhood and trumpet, ‘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 do unto you. Don’t
forget that millions is the crest of the groundlings.’ And, Jim, I thought my
friends looked at me with reproachful eyes, as they said, ‘You are well on

the road, Bob Brownley, and in time your heart and 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, Jim Randolph, as I listened to that
agonising tale of the changing of that girl’s heaven to hell, I did not see that
halo you and I have thought surrounded the sign of Randolph & Randolph.
I did not see it, Jim, but I did see myself, and I didn’t feel proud of the
picture. My God, Jim, is it possible you and I have joined the nobility of
Dirty Dollars? Is it possible we are leaving trails along our life’s path like
that Reinhart left through the home of these Virginians, such trails as this
girl has shown me?”
Bob had worked himself into a state of frenzy. I had never seen him so
excited as when he stood in front of me and almost shouted this fierce self-
denunciation.
“For heaven’s sake, Bob, pull yourself together,” I urged. “The captain on
the bridge there is staring at you wild-eyed, and Katherine will be up here to
see what has happened. Now, be a good fellow, and let us talk this thing
over in a sensible way. At the gait you are going we can do nothing to help
out your friends. Besides, what is there for you and me to take ourselves to
task for? We are no wreckers and none of our dollars is stained with
Frenzied Finance. My father, as you know, despised Reinhart and his sort as
much as we do. Be yourself. What does this girl want you to do? If it is
anything in reason, call it done, for you know there is nothing 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, Beulah
Sands’s story has aroused a lot of thoughts I have been a-sticking down
cellar late years, for, to tell the truth, I have some nasty twinges of
conscience every now and then when I get to thinking of this dollar game of
ours.”
I saw that the impulsive blood was fast cooling, and that it would only be
a 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 of money,
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 her
different legacies and turned them into cash, a matter of sixty thousand
dollars, and she got him to consent to let her come up here to see if during
the next six months she might not, in a few desperate plunges in the market,
run it up to enough to at least regain the trust funds. Yes, I know it is a wild
idea. I told her so at the beginning, but there was no need; she knew it, for
she is not only bright, but she has the best idea of 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 of thinking.”
“But how did she happen to come to you with this extraordinary
scheme?” I interrupted.
“It’s this way—her father, who knew Randolph & Randolph through
your father’s handling of the Seaboard’s affairs, learned of my connection
with the house, and gave her a letter, asking me to do what I could to help
his daughter carry out her plans. She wants to get a position with us, 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 the office. She tells me
she is good at shorthand, on the machine, or at correspondence, also that
she has been a contributor to the magazines. If this can be arranged, she
says she will on her own responsibility select the time and the stock, and
hurl the last of the Sands fortune at the market, and, Jim, she is game. The
blow seems to have turned this child into a wonderfully nervy creature, and,
old man, I am beginning to have a feeling that perhaps the cards may come
so she will win the judge out. You and I know where less than sixty
thousand has been run up to millions more than once, and that, too, without
the aid she will have, for I’ll surely do 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 was
indorsing 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 the beautiful
Southern girl would be thrown into close association with each other, and
further acquaintance could only deepen the startling influence Beulah Sands
had already won over my ordinarily sane and cool-headed comrade. As I
looked at my friend, burning with an ardour as unaccustomed as it was

impulsive, I felt a tug at my heartstrings at thought of the sudden cross-
roading of his life’s highway. But I, too, was filled with the glamour of this
girl’s wondrous beauty, and her terrible predicament appealed to me almost
as strongly as it had to Bob. So, although I knew it would be fatal to any
chance of his weighing the matter by common sense, I burst out:
“Bob, I don’t blame you for falling in with the girl’s plans. If I were in
your 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 for
me—how can I!”
It was no time to give way to emotional outbursts, and while Bob was
getting 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 help run
that sixty thousand to higher figures, but six months is a short time and a
million or two a world of money.”
“She knows that,” he said, “and the time is much shorter and the road to
go much longer than you figure,” he replied. “This girl is as high-tensioned
as the E string on a Stradivarius, and she declares she will have no charity
tips or unusual favours from us or any one else. But let us not talk about
that now or we’ll get discouraged. Let’s do as she says and trust to God for
the outcome. Are you willing, Jim, to take her into the office as a sort of
confidential secretary? If you will, I’ll take charge of her account, and
together we will do all that two men can for her and her father.”

Chapter II.

The following week saw Miss Sands, of Virginia, private secretary to the
head of Randolph & Randolph, established in a little office between mine
and 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 her
knowledge of figures by the hand-work she had done for the judge, all of
whose accounts she had kept. Bob and I saw that she was bent on
smothering her memory in that antidote for all ills of heart and soul—work.
Her office life was simplicity itself. She spoke to no one except Bob, save
in connection with such business matters of the firm’s as I might send her
by one of the clerks to attend to. To the others in the banking-house she was
just an unconventional young literary woman whose high social
connections had gained her this opportunity of getting at the secrets of
finance, from actual experience, for use in forthcoming novels. It had got
abroad that she was the writer of great distinction who, under a nom de
plume, had recently made quite a dent in the world’s literary shell—a
suggestion that I rightly guessed was one of Bob’s delicate ways of
smoothing out her path. I had tried in every way to make things easy for
her, but it was impossible for me to draw her out in talk, and finally I gave
it up. Had it not been that every time I passed her office door I was
compelled by the fascination which I had first felt, and which, instead of
diminishing, had increased with her reticence, to look in at the quiet figure
with the downcast eyes, working away at her desk as though her life
depended on never 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
could see things on a true slant, she had decided to try to bring her to our
house to live. But though the girl was sweetly gentle in her appreciation of
Kate’s thoughtful attentions, in her simple way she made us both feel that

our efforts would be for naught, that her position must be the same as that
of any other clerk in the office. We both finally left her to herself. Bob
explained to me, some three weeks after she came to the office, that she
received no visitors at her home, a hotel on a quiet uptown street, and that
even he had never had permission to call upon her there.
But from the day she came to occupy her desk in our office, Bob was a
changed man, whether for better or for worse neither Kate nor I could
decide. His old bounding elasticity was gone, and with it his rollicking
laugh. He was now a man where before he had been a boy, a man with a
burden. Even if I had not heard Beulah Sands’s story, I should have guessed
that Bob was staggering under a strange load. While before, from the close
of the Stock Exchange until its opening the next morning, he was, as Kate
was fond of putting it, always ready to fill in for anything from chaperon to
nurse, always open for any lark we planned, from a Bohemian dinner to the
opera, now weeks went by without our seeing him at our 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 every clerk knew when Bob
came or went, for it was with a rush, a shout, a laugh, and a bang of doors;
and on the floor of the Stock Exchange no man played so many pranks, or
filled his orders with so much jolly good-nature and hilarious
boisterousness. But from the day the Virginian girl crossed his path, Bob
Brownley was a man who was thinking, thinking, thinking all the time. It
was only with an effort that he would keep his eyes on whomever he was
talking with long enough to take in what was said, and if the saying
occupied much time it would be apparent to the talker that Bob was 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 that two million
dollars and the coming New Year were hurdling like kangaroos over Bob’s
mental rails and ditches, though I did not know it from anything he told me,
for after that talk on the upper deck of the Tribesman he had shut up like a
clam.
He did not exactly shun me, but showed me in many ways that he had
entered into a new world, in which he desired to be alone. That Beulah
Sands’s plight had roused into intense activity all the latent romance of my
friend’s nature, did not surprise me. I foresaw from the first that Bob would
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 point in the

innermost depths of his being. His was more than love; a fervid idolatry
now had possession of his soul, mind, and body. Yet its outward
manifestations were the opposite of what one would have looked for in this
gay and optimistic Southerner. It was rather priest-like worship, a calm
imperturbability that nothing seemed to distract or upset, at least in the
presence of the goddess who was its object. Every morning he would pass
through my office headed straight for the little room she occupied as if it
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 her presence
was the Bob Brownley of old. He would be in and out all day on any and
every pretext, always entering with an undisguised eagerness, leaving with
a slow, dreamy reluctance. That he never saw her outside the office, I am
sure, for she said good-night to him when he or she left for the day with the
same don’t-come-with-me dignity that she exhibited to all the rest of us. I
had not attempted to say a word to Bob about his feeling for Beulah Sands,
nor had he ever brought up the subject to me. On the contrary, he studiously
avoided it.
Three months of the six had now passed, and with each day I thought I
noted an increasing anxiety in Bob. He had opened a special account for
Miss Sands on the books of the house in his name as agent, with a credit of
sixty thousand dollars, and we both watched it with a painful tenseness of
scrutiny. It had grown by uneven jerks, until the balance on October 1st was
almost four hundred thousand dollars. On some of the trades Bob had
consulted me, and on others, two in particular where he closed up after a
few days’ operations with nearly two hundred thousand dollars profit, I did
not even know what the trading was based on until the stocks had been sold.
Then he said:
“Jim, that little lady from Virginia can give us a big handicap and play us
to a standstill at our own game. She told me to buy all the Burlington and
Sugar her account would stand, and did not even ask for my opinion. In
both cases I thought the operations were more the result of a wakeful night
and an I-must-do-something decision than anything else, and I tackled both
with a shiver; but when she told me to sell them out at a time I thought they
looked like going higher and the next day they slumped, I could not help
thinking about the destiny that shapes our ends.”

On my part I tried to help. On one occasion, without consulting her, I put
her account in on a sure thing underwriting, wherein she stood to make a
profit 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 that neither of
us dared help her to any short cuts. Bob was deeply impressed by her
principles, and, commenting on them, said: “Jim, if all Wall Street had a
code similar to Beulah Sands’s to hew to in their gambles, ours would be a
fairer and more manly game, and many of the multi-millionaires would be
clerking, while a lot of the hand-to-mouth traders would come downtown in
a new auto every day in the week. She does not believe in stock-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 he gets away with; and
that the other fellow’s loss makes him and his as miserable as would
robbery to the same amount. Yet she realises that she must get back those
millions stolen from her father and is willing to smother her conscience to
attempt it, provided she takes no unfair advantage of the other players. The
other day she said to me, ‘I have decided, because of my duty to my father,
to put away my prejudice against gambling, but no duty to him or to any
one can justify me in playing with marked cards.’ Jim, there is food for
reflection for you and me, don’t you think so?”
I did not argue it with him, for, after that Saturday’s outburst, I had made
up my mind to avoid stirring Bob up unnecessarily. Also, I had to admit to
myself that the things he had then said had raised some uncomfortable
thoughts in me, thoughts that made me glance less confidently now and
then at the old sign of Randolph & Randolph and at the big ledger which
showed that I, an ordinary citizen of a free country, was the absolute
possessor of more money than a hundred thousand of my fellow beings
together could accumulate in a lifetime, although each one had worked
harder, longer, more conscientiously, and with perhaps more ability than I.
As to how Beulah Sands’s code had affected my friend, I was ignorant.
For the first time in our association I was completely in the dark as to what
he was doing stockwise. Up to that Saturday I was the first to whom he
would rush for congratulations when he struck it rich over others on the
exchange, 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 about
his trading. I saw that his account with the house was inactive, that his
balance was about the same as before Miss Sands’s advent, and I came to

the conclusion that he was resting on his oars and giving his undivided
attention to her account and the execution of his commissions. His handling
of the business of the house showed no change. He still was the best broker
on the floor. However, knowing Bob as I did, I could not get it out of my
mind that his brain was running like a mill-race in search of some
successful solution to the tremendous problem that must be solved in the
next three months.
Shortly after the October 1st statements had been sent out, Bob dropped
in on Kate and me one night. After she had retired and we had lit our cigars
in the library he said:
“Jim, I want some of that old-fashioned advice of yours. Sugar is selling
at 110, and it is worth it; in fact it is cheap. The stock is well distributed
among investors, not much of it floating round ‘the Street.’ A good, big
buying movement, well handled, would jump it to 175 and keep it there.
Am I sound?”
I agreed with him.
“All right. Now what reason is there for a good, big, stiff uplift? That
tariff bill is up at Washington. If it goes through, Sugar will be cheaper at
175 than at 110.”
Again I agreed.
“‘Standard Oil’ and the Sugar people know whether it is going through,
for they control the Senate and the House and can induce the President to be
good. 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 the
Washington boss and he passes it out to the grafters, there will be a quiet
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
is the man who should load up quick and rush it up to a high level. If he

does it quickly, the stockholders, who now have it, will get a juicy slice of
the ripening melon, a slice that otherwise would go to those greedy
hypocrites at Washington, who are always publicly proclaiming that they
are there to serve their fellow countrymen, but who never tire of expressing
themselves to their brokers as not being in politics for their health.”
“So far, good reasoning,” I commented.
“Jim, the man who first knows when the Senators and Congressmen and
members of the Cabinet begin to buy Sugar, is the man who can kill four
birds 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 little Virginian
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 the deficiency; fatten up a
good friend’s bank account a million or so, and do a right good turn for the
stockholders who are about to be, for the hundredth time, bled out of profit
rightfully theirs.”
Bob was afire with enthusiasm, the first I had seen him show for three
months. Seeing that I had followed him without objection so far, he
continued:
“Well, Jim, I know the Washington buying has begun. All I know I have
dug out for myself and am free to use it any way I choose. I have gone over
the deal with Beulah Sands, and we have decided to plunge. She has a
balance of about four hundred thousand dollars, and I’m going to spread it
thin. I am going to buy her 20,000 shares and to take on 10,000 for myself.
If you went in for 20,000 more, it would give me a wide sea to sail in. I
know you never speculate, Jim, for the house, but I thought you might in
this case go in personally.”
“Don’t say anything more, Bob,” I replied. “This time the rule goes by
the board. But I will do better: I’ll put up a million and you can go as high
as 70,000 for me. That will give you a buying power of 100,000, and I want
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 of
Randolph & Randolph, and on general, special, and every other principle
was opposed to stock gambling, but I saw how Bob had worked it out, and
that to make the deal sure it was necessary for him to have a good reserve
buying 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 upset should 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 have allowed me to
have the short end of it, but so changed had he become in his anxiety to
make that money for the Virginians that he grabbed at my acceptance.
“Thank you, Jim,” he said fervently, and he continued: “Of course, I see
what’s going through your head, but I’ll accept the favour, for the deal is
bound to be successful. I know your reason for coming in is just to help out,
and that you won’t feel badly because your last 50,000 shares will 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 the underwriting, for you
will get a big profit anyway.”
Next day Sugar was lively on the Exchange. Bob bought all in sight and
handled the buying in a masterly way. When the closing gong struck,
Beulah Sands had 20,000 shares, which averaged her 115; Bob and I had
30,000 at an 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
were wildly scrambling for Sugar as soon as it began to jump. And it
certainly looked 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
was beside himself with joy. He dined with Kate and me, and as I watched
him my heart almost stopped beating at the thought—“if anything should
happen to upset his plans!” His happiness was pathetic to witness. He was
like a child. He threw away all the reserve of the past three months and
laughed and was grave by turns. After dinner, as we sat in the library over
our coffee, he leaned over to my wife and said:
“Katherine Randolph, you and Jim don’t know what misery I have been
in for three months, and now—will to-morrow never come, so I may get
into the whirl and clean up this deal and send that girl back to her father
with the money! I wanted her to telegraph the judge that things looked like
she would win out and bring back the relief, but she would not hear of it.
She is a marvellous woman. She has not turned a hair to-day. I don’t think
her pulse is up an eighth to-night. She has not sent home a word of
encouragement since she has been here, more than to tell her father she is
doing well with her stories. It seems they both agreed that the only way to
work the thing out was ‘whole hog or none,’ and that she was to say nothing

until she could herself bring the word ‘saved’ or ‘lost.’ I don’t know 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, but
invariably returning to Beulah Sands and to-morrow and its saving profits.
Finally, he got to a pitch where it seemed as though he must take off the lid,
and before Kate or I realised what was coming he placed himself in front of
us and said:
“Jim, Kate, I cannot go into to-morrow without telling you something
that neither of you suspect. I must tell some one, now that everything is
coming out right and that Beulah is to be saved; and whom can I tell but
you, 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-
morrow if this deal comes out as it must come, and I can put $1,500,000
into her hands and send her home to her father, then, then, I will tell her I
love her, and Jim, Kate, if she’ll marry me, good-bye, good-bye to this hell
of dollar-hunting, good-bye to such misery as I have been in for three
months, and home, a Virginia home, for Beulah and me.” He sank into a
chair and tears rolled down his cheeks Poor, poor Bob, strong as a lion in
adversity, hysterical as a woman with victory in sight.
The next day Sugar opened with a wild rush: “25,000 shares from 140 to
152.” That is the way it came on the tape, which meant that the crowd
around 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 the first or
opening price was; but after the first lull, after the gong, there were
officially reported transactions aggregating 25,000 shares and at prices
varying from 140 to 152. I was over on the floor to see the scramble, for it
was noised about long before ten o’clock that Sugar would open wild, and
then, too, I wanted to be handy if Bob should need any quick advice.
A minute before the gong struck, there were three hundred men jammed
around the Sugar-pole; men with set, determined faces; men with their coats
buttoned tight and shoulders thrown back for the rush to which, by
comparison, that of a football team is child’s play. Every man in that crowd
was a picked man, picked for what was coming. Each felt that upon his
individual powers to keep a clear head, to shout loudest, to forget nothing,
to keep his feet, and to stay as near the centre of the crowd as possible,

depended his “floor honour,” perhaps his fortune, or, what was more to him,
his client’s fortune. Nearly every man of them was a college graduate who
had won his spurs at athletics or a seasoned floor man whose training had
been even more severe than that of the college campus. When it 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 picked floor men into the crowd.
There may be a fortune to make or to lose in a minute or a sliver of a
minute. For instance, the man who that morning was able to snatch the first
5,000 shares sold at 140 could have resold them a few minutes afterward at
152 and secured $60,000 profit. And the man who was 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 he reported to his customer, was a
man to be pitied. Again, the trader who the 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 of repurchasing at a lower price than he sold it
for) 5,000 shares at 140 and who, finding himself in that surging mob with
Sugar selling at 152, could only get out by taking a loss of $60,000, or by
taking another chance of later paying 162—such a trader was also to be
pitied.
No one who scanned the crowd that morning would have believed that
the calm, set face on that erect Indian figure, occupying the very centre of
that horde of gamblers who were only awaiting the ringing clang of the
gong to hurl themselves like madmen at each other, was the hysterical man
who the night before was wildly praying for this moment. Nearly every man
in that crowd was calm, but Bob Brownley was the calmest of them all. It’s
the Exchange code that at any cost of heart or nerve-tear a man must retain
good form until the gong strikes. Then, that he must be as near the uncaged
tiger as human mind and body can be made. Only I realised what volcano
raged inside my chum’s bosom. If any other man of the crowd had known,
Bob’s chances of success would have been on par with a Canadian canoeist
short-cutting Niagara for Buffalo. Nine-tenths of the Stock Exchange game
is not letting your left brain-lobe know what race your right 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 their ten thousand alert
associates knew in advance the intentions of a fellow broker, the word
would sweep through that crowd with the sureness of uncorked 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 the game had started would
have his bones picked to a vulture-finish cleanness. Suddenly, as I watched
the scene, there rang through the great hall the first sharp stroke of the
gong. There were no echoes heard that morning. The metallic voice was yet
shaping its command to “at ’em, you fiends” when from three hundred
throats burst the wild sound of the Stock Exchange yell. No other sound in
any of the open or hidden places of all nature duplicates the yell of a great
Stock Exchange at an exciting opening. 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
shrill scream of triumph and the die-away note of disappointment, when the
floor men realise their success or their failure. I picked Bob’s magnificently
resonant voice from the mass—“40 for any part of 10,000 Sugar.” It was
this 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 of 25,000”;
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 those
who oppose them by trying to raise the price are bulls.

The great crowd was surging all over the room. Hats were smashed and
coats were being stripped from their owners’ backs as though made of
paper, and now and then a particularly frantic buyer or seller would be
borne to the floor by the impetus of those who sought to fill his bid or grab
his offer. Through all the wild whirl, straight and erect and commanding
was the form of Bob, his face cold and expressionless as an iceberg. In five
minutes the human mass had worked back to the Sugar-pole and there was
the inevitable lull while its members “verified.”
I could see by the few entries Bob was making on his pad that he had
been compelled to buy but little. This meant that his campaign was working
smoothly, that he was driving the market up by merely bidding, and that he
had the greater part of my 50,000 yet unbought, which inturn meant he
could 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 big
supporting orders.

Suddenly the lull was broken. Bob’s voice rang out again—“153 for any
part of 10,000 Sugar.” Again the gamblers closed in and for another five
minutes the opening scene was duplicated, with only a shade less
fierceness. After ten minutes’ mad trading a mighty burst of sound told that
Sugar was 160 bid. Then Bob worked his way out of the crowd, and passing
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 strode
through my office and into the little room occupied by Beulah Sands. He
closed the door behind him, a thing that he had never done before. It was
only a minute till he opened it and called to me. In his eyes was a strange
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 in deep natures and
which usually finds vent in tears. Beulah Sands was a study. Her heart was
evidently swaying and tugging with the news Bob had brought her. She
must have seen the nearness of release from the torture that had been filling
her soul during the past three months, and yet such was the remarkable self-
control of the woman, such her noble courage, that she refused to show any
outward sign of her feelings. She was the reserved, dignified girl I had ever
seen her. “Jim, Miss Sands and I thought it best that we should have a little
match up at this stage of our deal,” Bob began. “I want to know if you both
agree with me on adhering to the original plans to close out at 175. I never
felt surer of my ground than in this deal. The stock is 163 on the tape right
now.” He glanced at the white paper ribbon whose every foot on certain
days spells Heaven or Hell to countless mortals, as it rolled out of the ticker
in the corner of the 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 is unlimited; the commission-houses are tumbling over one another
to get aboard and the shorts are scared to a paralysed muteness. They don’t
know whether to jump in and cover or to stand their present hands, but they
have no pluck to fight the rise, that is certain. The news bureaus have just
published the story that I am buying for Randolph & Randolph, and they for
the insiders; that the new tariff is as good as passed; and that at 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 crosses 200. I’ve been
obliged to take on only 18,000 of your 50,000, and at present prices there is
over two hundred thousand profit in them. I think I could go back there and

in thirty minutes have it to 180. Then if I rested on it until about one o’clock
and threw myself at it for real fireworks up to the close, I could, under
cover of them, let slip about half our purchases, and to-morrow open her
with a whirl and let go the balance. If I’m in luck I’ll average 180-185 for
the whole bunch, but I’ll be satisfied if I get an average of 175, which
would allow me to sell it on a dropping scale to 160.”
I agreed that his campaign was perfect, and Beulah Sands said in her
usual quiet way, “It is entirely in your hands, Mr. Brownley. I don’t see how
any advice from us can help.”
Bob went back to the Exchange and I into my office. Bob had been right
again. In ten minutes the tape began to scream Sugar. With enormous
transactions it ran up in fifteen minutes to 188, in three more it dropped to
181, and then steadily mounted to 185½, dulled up, and was healthy steady.
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 all
of the last 50,000, which leaves me 12,000 reserve. The average is ‘way
under 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 say
it’s bad business to count chickens in the shell, but ours are tapping so hard
to get out I can’t help doing it this once. I’m going to keep away from the
floor for an hour or so, then I will go over and wind it up and—good God,
Beulah—Miss Sands—are you ill?”
The girl’s face was ashen gray and she seemed to be gasping for breath. I
rushed for some water while Bob seized both her hands, but in an instant
the blood came to her cheeks with a rush and she said, “I was dizzy for a
moment. It must have been the thought of taking $1,800,000 back to father
that upset me. With that amount father could make good all the trust funds,
and have back enough of his own fortune to make us seem, after what we
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
hold dear, God bless you? What could I or my father have done but for you
and Mr. Brownley?”
She turned her big eyes full upon Bob, filled with a light such as can
come only to a woman’s eyes, only to a woman before whom, as she stands
on the 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 have
struck a snag. Arthur Perkins, whom I left on guard at the pole, says Barry
Conant has just jumped in and supplied all the bids. He has it down to 81
and is offering it in 5,000 blocks and is aggressive. I must get there 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 on
tap,” he answered.
“Buy 50,000 shares, 5,000 each point down; and anything unfilled, give
to Bob 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 is
Camemeyer’s and ‘Standard Oil’s’ head broker. His being on the floor
means mischief. He never goes into a big whirl personally unless they are
out for blood. Bob has exhausted his buying power, and though I tell you
frankly that I never speculate, don’t believe in speculation and am in this
deal only for Bob—and for you—I swear I don’t intend to let them wipe the
floor with him without at least making them swallow some of the dust 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 only second 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
was tame in comparison. A bull market, however terrific, always is tame
beside a bear crash. In the few moments it took me to get to the floor, the

battle had started. The greater part of the Exchange membership was in a
dense mob wedged against the rail behind the Sugar-pole. I could not have
got within yards of the centre of that crowd of men, fast becoming panic-
stricken, if the fate of nations had depended on my errand. I had witnessed
such a scene before. It represented a certain phase of Stock-Exchange-
gambling procedure, where one man apparently has every other man on the
floor against him. I understood: Bob against them all—he trying to stay the
onrushing current of dropping prices; they bent on keeping the sluice-gates
open. He was backed up against the 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, his collar torn and hanging over his shoulder. His coat and
waistcoat were ripped open, showing the full length of his white shirt-front,
and his eyes were fairly mad. Bob was no longer a human being, but a
monarch of the forest at bay, with the hunter in front of him, and closing in
upon him, in a great half-circle, the pack of harriers, all gnashing their teeth,
baring their fangs, and howling for blood. The hunter directly facing Bob,
was Barry Conant—very slight, very short, a marvellously compact,
handsome, miniature man, with a fascinating face, dark olive in tint, lighted
by a pair of sparkling black eyes and framed in jet-black hair; a black
mustache was parted over white teeth, which, when he was stalking his
game, looked like those of a wolf. An interesting man at all times was this
Barry Conant, and he had been on more and fiercer battle-fields than any
other half-score members combined. The scene was a rare 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-acre
daisy-field cutting off the helpless flowers’ heads with every swing of his
arm. Switching stock-gamblers into eternity had grown to be a pastime to
Barry Conant. Here was Bob thundering with terrific emphasis “78 for
5,000,” “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 crush his
opponent into silence. But with the regularity of a trip-hammer Barry
Conant’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 on one side, a
Richelieu on the other. Though there was frantic buying and selling all
around these two generals, the trading was gauged by the trend of their
battle. All knew that if Bob should be beaten down by this concentrated

modern finance devil, a panic would ensue and Sugar would go none could
say how low. But if Bob should play him to a standstill by exhausting his
selling power, Sugar would quickly soar to even higher figures than before.
It was known that Barry Conant’s usual order from his clients, the “System”
masters, for such an occasion as the present was “Break the price at any
cost.” On the other hand, every one knew that Randolph & Randolph were
usually behind Bob’s big operations; this was evidently 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 of
pain shoot across his face, and realised that it probably meant he was
nearing the end of my last order. I sized it up that there was deviltry of more
than usual significance behind this selling movement; that Barry Conant
must have unlimited orders to sell and smash. My final order of fifty
thousand brought our total up to one hundred and fifty thousand shares, a
large amount for even Randolph & Randolph to buy of a stock selling at
nearly $200 a share. I then and there decided that whatever happened I
would go no further. Just then Bob’s wild eye caught mine, and there was in
it a piteous appeal, such an appeal as one sees in the eye of the wounded
doe when she gives up her attempt to swim to shore and waits the coming
of the pursuing hunter’s canoe. I sadly signaled that I was through. As Bob
caught the sign, he threw his head back and bellowed a deep, hoarse “70 for
10,000.” I knew then that he had already bought forty thousand, and that
this was the last-ditch stand. Barry Conant must have caught the meaning
too. Instantly, like a revolver report, came his “Sold!” Then the compact,
miniature mass of human springs and wires, which had until now been held
in perfect control, suddenly burst from its clamps, and Barry Conant was
the fiend his Wall Street reputation pictured him. 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 bewildering rapidity as his piercing voice rang
out—“5,000 at 69, 68, 65,” “10,000 at 63,” “25,000 at 60.” Pandemonium
reigned. Every man in the crowd seemed to have the capital stock of the
Sugar Trust to sell, and at any price. A score seemed to be bent on selling as
low as possible instead of for as much as they could get. These were the
shorts who had been punished the day before by Bob’s uplift.
Poor Bob, he was forgotten! An instant after he made his last effort he
was the dead cock in the pit. Frenzied gamblers of the Stock Exchange have

no more use for the dead cocks than have Mexicans for the real birds when
they get the fatal gaff. The day after the contest, or even that same night 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 fallen bird,
the bird that could not win! I saw a look of deep, terrible agony spread over
Bob’s face; and then in a flash he was the Bob Brownley who I always
boasted had the courage and the brain to do the right thing in all
circumstances. To the astonishment of every man in the crowd he let loose
one wild yell, a cross between the war-whoop of an Indian and the bay of a
deep-lunged hound regaining a lost scent. Then he began to throw over
Sugar stock, right and left, in big and little amounts. He slaughtered the
price, under-cutting Barry Conant’s every offer and filling every bid. For
twenty minutes he was a madman, then he stopped. Sugar was falling
rapidly to the price it finally reached, 90, and the panic was in full swing,
but panics seemed now to have no interest for Bob. He pushed his way
through the crowd and, joining me, said: “Jim, forgive me. I have dragged
you into an enormous loss, have ruined Beulah Sands, her father, and
myself. I think at the last moment I did the only thing possible. I threw over
the 150,000 shares and so cut off some of our loss. Let us go to the office
and see where we stand.” He was strangely, unnaturally calm after that
heart-crushing, nerve-tearing day. I tried to tell him how I admired his cool
nerve and pluck in about-facing and doing the only thing there was left to
do; to tell him that required more real courage and level-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 lesson to-
day. My plans were all right, and sound, but poor fool that I was, I did not
take into consideration the loaded dice of the master thieves. I knew what
they could do, have seen them scores of times, as you have, at their
slaughter; seen them crush out the hearts of other men just as good as 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 their owners, but it
never seemed to strike me home. It was not my heart, and somehow, 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 one I love—and yours, too, Jim—
systematically skewered to those of the hundreds and thousands of victims

who have gone before. Jim, we must be three millions losers, and the men
who have our money have so many, many millions that they can’t live long
enough even to thumb them over. Men who will use our money on the
gambling-table, at the race-tracks, squander it on stage harlots, or in turning
their wives and daughters or their neighbours’ wives and daughters into
worse than stage harlots. Men, Jim, who are not fit, measured by any
standard of decency, to walk the same earth as you and Judge Sands. Men
whose painted pets pollute the very air that such as Beulah Sands must
breathe. I’ve learned my lesson to-day. I thought I knew the game of
finance, but I’m suddenly awakened to a realisation of the dense ignorance I
wallowed in. Jim, but for the loading of the dice, I should now have been
taking Beulah Sands to her father with the money that the hellish ‘System’
stole from him. Later I should have taken her to the altar, and after, who
knows but that I should have had the happiest home and family in all the
world, and lived as her people and mine 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 a heroic effort to put the picture out of sight; but
I’m afraid, Jim, I’m afraid.”
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 till to-morrow,
and cut the dividend instead of increasing it. The world won’t know 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 few defaulters, a few new
convicts, an unclaimed corpse or two at the morgue; a few innocent girls,
whose fathers’ fortunes have gone to swell Camemeyer’s and ‘Standard
Oil’s’ already uncountable gold, turned into streetwalkers; a few new
palaces on Fifth Avenue, and a few new libraries given to communities that
formerly took pride in building them from their honestly earned savings. A
report or two of record-breaking diamond sales by Tiffany to the kings and
czars of dollar royalty, then front-page news stories of clawing, mauling,
and hair-pulling wrangles among the stage harlots for the possession of
these diamonds. They were not quite sure that the dividend cut alone would
do the trick, and they were taking no chances, these mighty warriors of the
‘System,’ so their hireling Senate committee held a session last night and
unanimously reported to put sugar on the free list. The people will read that

in the morning, and probably the day after they’ll be told that the committee
held another session to-night and unanimously reported to take it off the
free list. By that time these honourable statesmen will have loaded up with
the stock that you and I and Beulah Sands sold, and that other poor devils
will slaughter to-morrow after reading their morning papers.”
Bob’s bitterness was terrible. My heart was torn as I listened. He stalked
through the office and into that of Beulah Sands. I followed. She was at her
desk, and when she looked up, her great eyes opened in wonderment as they
took in Bob, his grim, set face, the defiant, sullen desperation of the big
brown eyes, the dishevelled hair and clothes. For an instant she stood as one
who had seen an apparition.
“Look me over, Beulah Sands,” he said, “look me over to your heart’s
content, 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, with men
who really know how to play the game of dollars as it is played in this
Christian age. Don’t ask me not to call you Beulah; that what I tried to 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’m the fool who did it.”
She rose from her desk with all the quiet, calm dignity that we had been
admiring for three months, and stood facing Bob. She did not seem to see
me; she saw nothing but the man who had gone out that morning the
personification of hope, who now stood before her the picture of black
despair, and she must have thought, “It was all for me.” Suddenly she took
the 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 looking straight
into his, she said:
“Bob.”
That was all, but the word seemed to change the very atmosphere in the
room. The look of desperation faded from Bob’s face, and as though the
words had sprung the hidden catch to the doors of his storehouse of pent-up
misery, his eyes filled with hot, blinding tears. His great chest was
convulsed with sobs. Again—clear, calm, fearless, and tender, came the one
syllable, “Bob.” And at that Bob’s self-control slipped the leash. With a
hoarse cry, he threw his arms around her and crushed her to his breast. The
sacredness of the scene made me feel like an intruder, and I started to leave
the room. But in a moment Beulah Sands was her usual self and, turning to

me, she said: “Mr. Randolph, please forget what you have seen. For an
instant, as I saw Mr. Brownley’s awful misery, I thought of nothing but
what he had done for me, what he had tried to do for my father, what a
penalty he has paid. From what you said when you left and the fact that I
got no word from either of you, I feared the worst and did not dare look at
the tape; I simply waited and hoped and—prayed. Yes, I prayed as my
mother taught me I should pray whenever I was helpless and could do
nothing myself. And I felt that God would not let the noble work of two
such men be overthrown by those you were battling with. In the midst of a
calmness that I took for a good omen, you came. Can you blame me for
forgetting myself? Mr. Brownley,” the voice was now calm and self-
controlled, “tell me what you have done. Where do we stand?” “There is
little to tell,” Bob answered. “Camemeyer and ‘Standard Oil’ have taken me
into camp as they would take a stuck pig. They have made a monkeyfied
ass out of me, and we are ruined, and I have caused Mr. Randolph a heavy
loss. Roughly, I figure that of your four hundred thousand capital and the
million four hundred thousand profit you had this morning, only your
capital remains.”
Wishing to spare Bob, I interrupted and myself gave the girl briefly the
details of what had happened. She listened intently and seemed to take in all
the trickery of the “System” masters; seemed to see just what it meant to us
and to her. But she made no comment, showed by no outward sign that she
suffered. As soon as I was through she turned to Bob, who had stood with
his eyes fastened upon her face, as though somewhere out of its soft beauty
must come an assurance that this was all a bad dream.
“Mr. Brownley,” she said, “let us figure up just where we stand, so that
we may know what to do to recoup. You have said so many times, since I
have been here, that Wall Street is magic land; that no man may tell twenty-
four hours ahead what will happen to him. You have said it so many times
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. We have yet
almost three months left, and I do not see why we have not just as much
chance as we had day before yesterday. Yes, and more, because we know
more now. Next time we will include the dividend cuts and the Senate
duplicity 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
had woman’s hope, so persistent where her loved ones are concerned, made
Beulah Sands blind to the awfulness of the situation? As I looked at her I
could not doubt that she fully realised our position, that she was really
suffering more than either of us, that she was only acting to ease Bob’s
anguish. Bob brought out his memoranda, and in half an hour we had the
figures. The total loss was nearly three millions. As Beulah Sands’s 20,000
shares had cost less than ours and Bob figured to leave her capital of
$400,000 intact, we felt some comfort. Beulah Sands had watched the
figuring with the keenness of an expert, and when Bob announced the final
figures, which showed that she still had what she started with, she drew the
sheet containing the totals to her. “I was willing to accept your assistance,”
she said, “when the deal promised a profit to all of us, because I appreciated
your goodness and knew how much it would hurt your feelings if I were
churlish about the division; but now that we all lose I must stand my fair
share; I must.” She said this in a way that we both knew precluded the
possibility of argument. “We owned together 150,000 shares. 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, you will see that $370,000 is
charged to my account. I shall have $30,000 left. If our cause is as just as
we think, God in his goodness will make this ample for our purposes.”
Though Bob and I were in despair at her determination to strip herself of
what Bob had worked so hard to accumulate, we could not help feeling a
reverence for her faith and her sturdy independence. She now showed us in
her delicate way that she wished to be alone; as we went she held out her
hand to Bob. “Mr. Brownley, please, for the sake of the work we have to do,
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 grasp victory. 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
are taught women are the weaker sex. Now listen to what you must do.
Accept my notes for the whole loss, less one hundred thousand which I
have to my credit, 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 to have tempted you. If I remain in my present busted condition, the

notes will be blank paper. Therefore you do me no harm in taking them. If I
should strike it rich, I should never feel like a man until I made up the loss.”
It was no use arguing with him in his inflexible mood, so I took his
demand 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’s break still
fresh in her mind. Next day he did not turn up. Along in the afternoon I
received a telegram from him, saying that he was on his way to Virginia,
that he needed a rest and would be back in a week. I was worried, nervous.
It takes until the next day and the day after, and the week after that, to get
down to the deepest misery of an upset such as we had been through. I did
not feel easy with Bob out of sight while he was sounding for a new
footing. I went to Beulah Sands in hope we might talk over the affair, but
when I told her that Bob was to be gone for a week and that I was uneasy,
she said in her calm, confident manner: “I don’t think there is anything to
worry about, Mr. Randolph. Mr. Brownley is too much of a man to allow an
affair of dollars to do anything more than annoy him. He will be back all the
better for his rest.” She dropped her long lashes in a this-conversation-is-
closed way that we had come to know meant going time.

Chapter IV.

The following week Bob returned to the office. He had not changed, and
yet he had changed greatly. Rest had apparently done much for him. His
colour was good, his step elastic as of old, and his head was thrown back as
if he were buckled up for the fray and wanted all to know it. Yet there was
something 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 arms of his
chair, that told me more plainly than words that this was not the optimistic,
soft-hearted Bob Brownley I had known and loved. I could not help feeling
that if I had been a leader of the Russian terrorists, and this man who now
sat before me had come to my ken when I was selecting bomb-throwers, I
should have seized upon him of all men as the one to stalk the Czar or his
marked minions. Surely the iron that had entered Bob’s soul a week before
had affected his whole being. I think Beulah Sands had some such thoughts.
For I saw a shadow of perplexity cross her broad, low forehead after her
first meeting with him, a shadow that had not been there before.
For days after Bob’s return I saw little of him. I think Beulah Sands saw
less. 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 handed
them out to his assistants. As far as I could learn, he spent much of his time
there yesterdaying through hope’s graveyards, a not uncommon pastime for
active Exchange members whose first through specials have been open-
switched by the “System” towerman. So strong had become this habit of
going about from pole to pole with bent head and a far-off gaze that his
fellow members began to humour and respect it. They all knew that Bob
had gone up against the Sugar panic hard. No one knew how hard, but all
guessed from his changed appearance and habits that it must have been a
bone-smashing blow. Nothing so quickly and so deeply stirs a Stock
Exchange man’s feelings for his brother member as to know that “They”
have ditched his El Dorado flyer—that is, if he has been a good the books

showed no change in Beulah Sands’s account. There was the poor little
$30,000 balance; no other entries. One afternoon Beulah Sands had asked
for a meeting between Bob and myself in her office. She could hardly have
asked Bob to come without me, but I knew it was Bob she wanted to see,
and I felt that the best thing I could do for them was to leave them alone. So
I made some excuse for a moment’s delay at my desk, telling Bob to go on
into her office, and promising to follow shortly. He went in, leaving the
door partly open. I think that from the moment he entered the room both of
them 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 you
about my account,” I heard her begin in a voice a trifle uneven, “but as I
must go back to Father Christmas week, I wanted to get your advice as to
the advisability of writing him that, though there is still a chance for doing
wonders, I do not think we shall be able to save him. Of course I won’t put
it in just that blunt way, but it seems to me I should begin to prepare him for
the blow. I have not talked over any more plunging with you, Mr. Brownley,
since the unlucky one in Sugar, and——”
“Miss Sands, I understand what you mean,” Bob broke in, “and I should
apologise 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. I hope you
don’t think I have forgotten. Never for a moment since I took charge of
your affairs have I forgotten my promise to see that they were kept 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 old confidence in
myself since that day in Sugar when I killed your hopes and destroyed the
chance of saving your father—no, I have not had that confidence a man
must have in himself to win at this game.”
There was a silence, and then I heard an indescribable fluttering rush that
told as plainly as sight could have done that a woman had answered her
heart’s call. Looking up involuntarily, I saw a sight that for a long moment
held my eyes as if I had been fascinated. It was Bob bowed forward with
his face hidden in his hands and beside him, on her knees, Beulah Sands,
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 is breaking for
you. You were so happy when I came into your life, and the happiness is
changed to misery and despair, and all for me, a stranger. At first I thought
of nothing but father and how to save him, but since that day when those

men struck at your heart, I have been filled with, oh! such a 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, his arms
closed around her. She bent her head and laid her beautiful, soft cheek,
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 love who
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 sat in
your chair. I have laid my head on your desk and cried and cried until it
seemed as though I could not live till morning without hearing you say that
you loved me, and that you did not mind the ruin I had brought into your
life. I have patted the back of your chair where your dear head had rested. I
have covered the arms of your chair, that your strong, brave hands had
gripped, with kisses. Night after night I have knelt at your desk and prayed
to God to shield you, to protect you from all harm, to brush away the black
cloud I brought into your life. I have asked Him to do with me, yes, with
my father and mother, anything, anything if only He would 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’s bed
to tell of the black goblins that have been pursuing it. Long before she had
finished speaking—and it took only a few heart-beats for that rush of words
—I had broken the power of the fascination that held me, had turned away
my eyes, and tried not to listen. For fear of breaking the spell, I did not dare
cross the room to close Beulah’s door or to reach the 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 seemed hour-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 close the
door. But again I saw a picture that transfixed me. Bob had taken Beulah by
both shoulders and he held her off and looked into her eyes long and
beseechingly. Never before nor since have I seen upon human face that
glorious joy which the old masters sought to get into the faces of their

worshippers who, kneeling before Christ, tried to send to Him, through their
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 dead wife, Bob bent
his head and kissed her forehead. Again and again he drew her to him and
implanted upon her brow and eyes and lips his kisses. I could not stand the
scene any longer. I started to the corridor-door, and then, 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 one of those reluctant laughs of
happiness yet wet with sobs.
“Well, Jim, dear old Jim, where did you come from? Like all
eavesdroppers, you have heard no good of yourself. Own up, Jim, you did
not hear a word good or bad about yourself, for it is just coming back to me
that we have been selfish, that we have left you entirely out of our business
conference.”
We all laughed, and Beulah Sands, with her face a bloom of burning
blushes, said: “Mr. Randolph, we have not settled what it is best to do about
father’s affairs.”
After a little we did begin to talk business, and finally agreed that Beulah
should write her father, wording her letter as carefully as possible, to avoid
all direct statements, but showing him that she had made but little headway
on the work she had come North to accomplish. Bob was a changed being
now; so, too, was Beulah Sands. Both discussed their hopes and fears with a
frankness in strange contrast to their former manner. But there was one
point on which Bob showed he was holding back. I finally put it to him
bluntly: “Bob, are you working out anything that looks 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-day
important letter. Answer as soon as you receive.’”
The following afternoon the letter came. It showed Judge Sands in a very
nervous, 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 been receiving
anonymous letters, advising them to look into the judge’s trust affairs; that
the Reinhart crowd had been using renewed pressure to make him let go all
his Seaboard stock, which they wanted to secure at the low prices to which
they had depressed it, in order that they might reorganise and carry out the
scheme they had been so long planning. Judge Sands went on to say that the
day he was compelled to sell his Seaboard stock he would have to make
public an announcement of his condition, as there could 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 father
and our home, that you may see our situation as it is. My father is one of the
noblest men that ever lived. I am not the only one who says that—if you
were to ask the people of our State to name the one man who had done most
for the State as a State, most for her progressive betterment, most for her
people high and low, white and black, they would answer, ‘Judge Lee
Sands.’ He has been, and is, the idol of our people. After he was graduated
from Harvard, he entered the law office of my grandfather, Senator Robert

Lee Sands. Before he was thirty he was in Congress and was even then
reputed the greatest orator of our State, where orators are so plentiful. He
married my mother, his second cousin, Julia Lee, of Richmond, at twenty-
five, and from then until the attack of that ruthless money-shark, led a life
such as a true man would map out for himself if his Maker granted him the
privilege. You would have to visit at our home to appreciate my father’s
character and to understand how terrible this sorrow is to him. Every
morning of his life he spends an hour after breakfast with my dear mother,
who is a cripple from hip disease. He takes her in his arms and brings her
down from her room to the library as if she were a child. He then reads to
her—and he knows good books as well as he knows his friends. After he
takes mother back to her room, he gives an hour to our people, the blacks of
the plantation and his white tenants throughout the county. He is a father to
them all. He settles all their troubles, big and little. Then for hours he and I
go over his business affairs. Every afternoon from four to five he devotes to
his estates and the 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 man should have in America. It is all he is entitled to under our
form of government. Any more than that an honest man should in one way
or another return to the people from whom he has taken it. I never want my
family to have 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 old friends, and he has acted as their solicitor for years—in building
up the South. He discussed with me the right and advisability of putting in
the trust funds. He said he considered it his duty to employ them as he did
his 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 belting for the
‘System’ grinder. These fortunes were made in the South by men who loved
their section of the country more than they did wealth, and why should they
not be employed to benefit that part of the country which their makers and
owners loved? I remember vividly how perplexed he was when, at the
beginning, the Wilsons would show him that the investments were returning
unusually large profits.
“‘It is not right, Beulah,’ he said to me one morning after receiving a
letter from Baltimore to the effect that Seaboard stock and bonds had
advanced until his investment showed over fifty per cent, profit, ‘it is not
right for us to make this money. No man in America should make over legal

rates of interest and a fair profit on an investment, that is, an investment of
capital pure and simple, particularly in a transportation company, where
every dollar of profit comes from the people who patronise the lines. I have
worked it out on every side, and it is not right; it would not be legal if the
people, who make the laws for their own betterment, understood their
affairs as they should.’
“He was always writing to the Wilsons to conduct the affairs of the
Seaboard so that there would be remaining each year only profits enough to
keep the road up and the wharves in good condition and to pay the annual
interest and a fair dividend. And when the Wilsons came to our house to lay
before him the offer of Reinhart and his fellow plunderers to pay enormous
profits for the control of the Seaboard, he was indignant and argued with
them that the offer was an insult to honest men. It was he who advised the
trusteeship control of the Seaboard stock to prevent Reinhart from securing
control. I sat in the library when he talked to the elder Wilson and the
directors.
“He appealed directly to John Wilson to make an effort to stop the
growing tendency to use the people as pawns to enslave themselves and
their children. He said some man of undoubted probity, standing, and
wealth, someone whom the people trusted, must start the fight against these
New York fiends, whose only thought is to roll up wealth. And he told John
Wilson he was the man, since he had great wealth, honestly got by his
father and grandfather; no one would accuse him of being a hypocrite,
seeking notoriety, and his standing in the financial world was so old and
solid that it would have to listen to him. I remember-how emphatically
father said: ‘I tell you, John, even the discussion of such a proposition as
that scoundrel Reinhart makes is degrading to an American’s honour.’ He
said it didn’t make the least difference if Reinhart counted his millions by
the score, and was director in thirty or forty great institutions, and gave a
fortune every year for charity and to the church—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, which represents a certain amount of
money invested, and double or multiply it by five and ten, simply because
he can compel the people to pay exorbitant fares and freight-rates and so get
profits on this fraudulently increased capital.

“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 to be
bled by the Wall Street ‘System,’ that started Reinhart and his dollar-fiends
on the war-path. You can see from what I tell you of my father the terrible
condition he is in now. At night, when I get to thinking of him, hoping
against hope, with no one to help him, no one with whom he can talk over
his affairs, when I think of his nobleness in devoting his time to mother and
by sheer will-power concealing from her his awful suffering, it nearly
drives me mad.”
“Miss Sands, why will you not let me lend you the money necessary to
tide your father over for a while?” I asked.
“You are so good, Mr. Randolph, but you don’t quite understand my
father in spite of what I have said. He would not relieve his suffering at the
expense of another, not if it were a hundred times more acute. You cannot
understand the old-fashioned, deep-rooted pride of the Sands.”
“But can you not, at least temporarily, disguise from him just how you
have 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 even
to save his life. It would be impossible. My father abhors a lie. He believes
a man or woman who would lie the lowest of the low things on earth. When
I go back to my father he will say, ‘Tell me what you have done.’ I can just
see him now, standing between the big white pillars at the 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 moment getting to her.’
Afterward he’ll take me over the plantation to show me all the familiar
things, and not one word will he allow me to say about our affairs until
dinner is over, until the neighbours have left, for no Sands returns from long
absence without a fitting home welcome. When I have said good night to
mother and sister and he has drawn up my rocker in front of his big chair in
the library alcove and I’ve lighted his cigar for him, he will look me in the
eye and say, ‘Daughter, tell me all you have done.’ I would no more think of
holding anything back than I would of stabbing him to the heart. No, Mr.
Randolph, there is no possibility of relief except in fairly using that
$30,000, and fairly winning back what Wall Street has stolen from father.
Even that will cause both of us many twinges of conscience, and anything

more is impossible. If this cannot be done, father must, all of us must, pay
the penalty of Reinhart’s ruthless act.”
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
able to do something soon.” It was evident to both of us that he had some
plan in 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 millions profit
from her operations, that they had been lost, and that the outlook was not
reassuring. She begged him to prepare himself for the final calamity;
promising that if there were no change for the better by December 1st, she
would come home to be with him when the blow fell. She begged him to
prepare to meet it like a Sands, and assured him that if worse came to worst
she would earn enough to keep poverty away. Judge Sands would receive
this letter the second day following, Friday, the 13th day of November. My
God! how well I know the date. It is seared into my brain as though with a
white-hot iron.
After our talk with Beulah Sands I begged Bob to dine with me and go
over matters 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 Tariff
Bill was buttoned up to-day, and it has just been announced that the Sugar
directors have declared a big extra stock dividend. Things have come out
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 250 for it in
ten days. Barry Conant has been a steady buyer all day and the news
bureaus announced that Camemeyer and the ‘Standard Oil’ are twenty
millions winners. They say the Washington gamblers, the Congressmen,
Senators, and Cabinet members with their heelers and lobbyists have made
a killing. About every one seems to have fattened up, Jim, but you and me
and Beulah Sands and the public. The public gets the axe both ways as
usual. They have been shaken out of their stock, and they will be compelled
to pay millions more each year for their sugar than they would if this law
had not been made for their benefit. Jim, there is no disguising the fact that
the American people are as helpless in the hands of these thugs of the
‘System’ as though they lived in the realm of the Sultan, where a few
cutthroat brigands are licensed to rob and oppress to their heart’s content.

Jim Randolph, you know this game of finance. You know how it is worked
and the men who work it. Tell me if there is any consideration due Wall
Street and its heart-and-soul butchers at the hands of 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
knew how to beat Wall Street at its own game, he should hesitate to beat it
—hesitate because of anything connected with conscience or morals? You
saw what Barry Conant was able to do to us that day simply by standing on
the floor of the Stock Exchange and outstaying me in opening and closing
his mouth. You saw he was able to sell Sugar to a point so low that I was
obliged to let go of our 150,000 shares at eight to ten million dollars less
than we could have got for them if we could have held them until to-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 this
because he had more money behind him than you.”
“You think so, do you, Jim? That is the way it looks to you, but I tell you
money had nothing to do with it. Nothing had to do with it but the fiendish
system of fraud and trickery upon which the whole stock-gambling
structure is reared. Nothing entered into the whole business but the trickery
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. From the
minute Barry Conant came into that crowd until he left and we were ruined,
he showed no money, no anything that I did not show. From the very nature
of the business he could not. He simply said ‘Sold’ oftener and longer than I
said ‘Buy.’ He may have had money back of him, or he may only have had
nerve. God Almighty is the only one who can tell, for when Conant was
through he was able to buy back at 90 the 50,000 shares he sold me at 175,
the 50,000 that broke my back. Jim, if I had known as much that day as I do
now I would have stood in that crowd and bought all the stock he sold at
180 and I would have stood there buying until hell froze over or he quit;
then I would have made him rebuy it at 280 or 2,080, and I would 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 get
head or tail of what you are driving at.”

“I know you can’t, Jim, neither could Wall Street if it were listening to
me. But you will, and Wall Street will too, before many days go by. Now I
must 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. All
day long they tossed Sugar from one to another as though each thousand
shares had been a wisp of hay instead of $200,000—for soon after the
opening 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 the
alert to steer the course of prices when they threatened to run away on the
up or the down side. It was evident to the expert readers of the tape that the
“System” was currying its steed for an exceptionally brilliant run. Ike
Bloomstein, the Average Fiend, who for forty years had kept close track of
every movement on the floor, and who would bet anything, from his Fifth
Avenue mansion to his overripe boardroom straw hat, that all stocks and
movements were as strictly subject to the law of averages as are the tides 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-
pen deh haf ben pilding since deh took Pop Prownlee and deh Rantolphs
into gamp. Unless my topesheet goes pack on me, for deh first dime in forty
years 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-edged
teeth ever spelt a killin’, they do to-day. I just got orders from somewhere to
drop call money from four to two and a half per cent., and they have given
me ten millions to drop it with and the order is to favour Sugar as ‘collat.’
Some one is anxious to make it easy for the bleaters to get the coin to buy
all the Sugar they want. Ike, you and I might make turkey money for
Thanksgiving if we only knew whether Barry and his bunch were going to
shoot her up thirty or forty points before they turned the bag upside down,
or whether they will bury them from 200 to 150. What do you think?”
“I gant make out, aldo I haf vatched dem sharp all day. Dey certainly haf
deh lambs lined up right now for any vey dey vont to twist id. I nefer see a
petter market for a deluge. From Barry’s movements all day I should say
dey vould keep hoistin’ her until apout noon to-morrow, unt dat deh might
get her up to two-tirty or even to deh two-fifty. Put dere are von or two
topes on deh sheet vhat run deh uder vay. First der is dey fact you gant run

out, dat dere is alreaty on deh Sugar vagon deh piggest load of chuicy
suckers dat efer game in from deh suppurbs. Sharley Pates says if any von
hat tapped his Vashington vire er any utter Capitol vire dis veek he vould
haf tought dere vas a Senate, House, unt Kabinet roll-gall on. Deh topes say
‘Cam’ vill nefer led dat fat punch off grafters slite out mit real money 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’t think I
would take any chance of tempting them to dump and grab the profits by
carrying it much over 200. But you can’t tell what ‘Cam’ and those four-
eyed dentists at 26 Broadway will do.”
“Yes, put der iss anudder t’ing, Cho, dat makes me sit up unt plink about
her goin’ ofer two hundred. To-morrow’s Friday der t’irteenth.”
“Of course, Ike, that is something to be reckoned with, and every man on
the 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 on this trip: no
man on the floor knows what Friday the 13th, means better than 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 his windpipe. He’s
never left the pole for a minute; but suppose, Ike, Barry has tipped off
‘Cam’ that all the boys will let go their fliers, and most of them will take
one on the short side over to-night for a superstition drop at the opening;
and suppose ‘Cam’ has told him to take them all into camp 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 loan commissions or stick to plain
workday food.”
“Zame here, Cho. Say, Cho, haf you noticed Pop Prownlee to-tay? He
has frozen 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 a trade to-tay unt yet he sticks like a stamp-tax. I ben keeping my
eyes on him for I t’ought he hat someding up his sleeve dat might raise tust
ven he tropt id. I dink Parry has hat deh same itear. He never loses sight of
him, yet Pop hasn’t made a trade to-tay, unt here id iss twenty minutes of

der glose unt dere iss Parry in deh centre again whooping her up ofer two
hundred unt four.”

Chapter V.

Thursday, November 12th, was a memorable day in Wall Street. As the
gong pealed its the-game’s-closed-till-another-day, the myriad of tortured
souls that are supposed to haunt the treacherous bogs and quicksands of the
great Exchange, where lie their earthly hopes, must have prayed with
renewed earnestness for its destruction before the morrow. Never had the
Stock Exchange folded its tents with surer confidence of continuing its
victorious march. Sugar advanced with record-breaking total sales to 207½
and in the final half-hour carried the whole list of stocks up with it. In that
time some of the railroads jumped ten points. Sugar closed at the very top
amid great excitement, with Barry Conant taking all offered. During the last
thirty minutes it had become evident to all that the boardroom traders and
plungers, together with many of the semi-professional gamblers, who
operated through commission houses, were selling out their long stock and
going short over the opening of the Wall Street hoodoo-day, Friday, the
thirteenth of the month. But it was also evident, with the heavy selling at
the close and the stiffness of the price, which had never wavered as block
after block was thrown on the market, that some powerful interest as well
had taken cognisance of the fact that the morrow was hoodoo-day. At the
close, most of the sellers, had they been granted another five minutes,
would have repurchased, even at a loss, what they had sold, for it looked as
though they had sold themselves 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 was
friendly to Barry Conant and the “System,” and that it would print nothing

displeasing to them. Therefore, this must be, a foreword of the coming
harvest of the bulls and the slaughter of the bears.
Others than Ike Bloomstein remarked upon the fact that Bob Brownley
had hung close to the Sugar-pole all day, but when the close had come and
gone without his having anything to do with the Sugar skyrockets, he
dropped out 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
interruption in the centre of the Sahara than in Wall Street between ten and
three o’clock. Some sage has said that the human mind, like the well-
bucket, can carry only its fill. The Wall Street mind always has its fill of
budding dollars. In consequence, there is never room for those other
interests that enter the normal mind.
Friday, the 13th of November, drifted over Manhattan Island in a drear
drizzle of marrow-chilling haze, which just missed being rain—one of those
New York days that give a hesitating suicide renewed courage to cut the
mortal coil. By ten o’clock it had settled down on the Stock Exchange and
its surrounding infernos with a clamminess that damped the spirits of the
most rampant bulls. No class in the world is so susceptible to atmospheric
conditions as stock-gamblers. Many a stout-hearted one has been known to
postpone the inauguration of a long-planned coup merely because the air
filled his blood with the dank chill of superstition. Because of the expected
Sugar pyrotechnics, Stock Exchange members had gathered early; the
brokers’ offices were crowded to overflowing before ten; 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 to take place in Sugar. The
knowing ones saw the ear-marks of the “System’s” press-agent in these
stories; and they knew that this industrious institution had not sat up the
night before because of insomnia. All the signs pointed to a killing, and a
terrific one—pointed so plainly that the 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 not
come in by five minutes to ten I decided to go over to the Exchange and see
if he were going to mix up in the baiting of the Sugar bears. I had no
specific reasons for thinking he was interested except his recent queer
actions, particularly his hanging to the Sugar-pole, yet doing nothing, the
day before. But it is one of the best-established traditions of stock-

gambledom that when an operator has been bitten by a rabid stock he is
invariably attracted to it every time afterward that it shows signs of
frothing. More than all, I had one of those strong nowhere-born-nowhere-
cradled intuitions common to those living in the stock-gambling world,
which made me feel the creepy shadow of coming events.
As on that day a few weeks before, the crowd was at the Sugar-pole, but
its alignment was different. There in the centre were Barry Conant and his
trusted lieutenants, but no opposing rival. None of those hundreds of
brokers showed that desperate resolve to do or die that is born of a
necessity. They were there to buy or sell, but not to put up a life or death,
on-me-depends-the-result fight. Those who were long of stock could easily
be distinguished by their expressions of joy from the shorts, who had seen
the handwriting on the wall and were filled with uncertainty, fear, terror.
The demeanour of Barry Conant and his lieutenants expressed confidence:
they were going to do what they were there to do. They showed by their
tight-buttoned coats, and squared shoulders that they expected lots of rush,
push, and haul work, but apparently they anticipated no last-ditch fighting.
The gong pealed and the crowd of brokers sprang at one another, but only
for blood, not flesh, bone, heart, and soul; just blood. The first price on
Sugar was 211 for 3,000 shares. Someone sold it in a block. Barry Conant
bought it. It did not require three eyes to see that 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 to establish the basis for the
trades that are to follow—one of those minor frauds of stock-gambling by
which the public is deceived and the traders and plungers are handicapped
with loaded dice. In principle, it is a device older than stock exchanges
themselves, and is put to use elsewhere than on the floor. For instance, four
genuine buyers want a particular animal worth $200 at a horse auction. Its
owner’s pal starts the bidding at $400, and the four, not being up in horse
values, are thereby induced to reach for it at between $400 to $500. But
human nature, whether at horse sales or at stock-gambling, loves to be
“hinky-dinked” as much as the moth loves to play tag with the candle
flame. In five minutes Sugar was selling at 221, and the frantic shorts were
grabbing for it as though there never was to be another share put on sale,
while Barry Conant and his lieutenants were most industriously pushing it
just beyond their reaching finger-tips, either by buying it as fast as it was
offered by genuine 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 about
two-thirds of the way from the centre. Every other active floor member was
there too. Even Ike Bloomstein and Joe Barnes, who seldom went into the
big crowds, were on hand, perhaps to catch a flier for their Thanksgiving
turkey money, perhaps to get as near the killing as possible. Bob was not
trading, although, as on the day before, he never took his eye off Barry
Conant. I said to myself, “He is trying to fathom Barry Conant’s
movements,” but for what purpose puzzled me. The hands of the big clock
on the wall showed that trading had been thirty minutes under way and still
Barry Conant was pushing up the price. His voice had just rung out “25 for
any 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 in
front of Barry Conant. He was not the Bob who had taken Barry Conant’s
gaff 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 down
upon his opponent.
The effect upon Barry Conant was different from that of Bob’s last bid on
the day when Beulah Sands’s hopes went skyward in dust. It did not rouse
him to the wild, furious desire for the onslaught that he showed then, but
seemed to quicken his alert, prolific mind to exercise all its cunning. I think
that in that one moment Barry Conant recalled his suspicions of the day
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 had
ditched Bob’s treasure-train. He hesitated for just the fraction of a second,
while he waved with lightning-like rapidity a set of finger signals to his
lieutenants. Then he squared himself for the encounter. “25 for 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 were fixed upon each
other, in Barry’s a defiant glare, in Bob’s mingled pity and contempt. The
rest of the brokers hushed their own bids and offers until it could have
truthfully been said that the floor of the Stock Exchange 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 first time in all his wonderful career he
realised that the “System” was to meet its Nemesis, or what the cause, none
could tell, perhaps not even Barry Conant himself, but some emotion

caused his olive face for an instant to turn 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, was evident 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 lieutenants got in a “Take it”; although whether they wanted to or
not was an open question until Bob allowed his voice to dwell just a
pendulum swing of time on the 20. It was as if he were tantalising them into
sticking by their guns. By the time he paused, Barry Conant’s nerve was
back, for his piercing “Take it” had linked to it “20 for any part of 10,000.”
The bid was yet on his lips when Bob’s deep voice rang out “Sold.” “Any
part of 25,000 at 19, 18, 15, 10.” Hell was now loose. Back and forth, up
against the rail, around the room and back and around again, the crowd
surged for fifteen of the wildest, craziest minutes in the history of the New
York Stock Exchange, a history replete with records of wild and crazy
scenes.
At last from sheer exhaustion there came a ten minutes’ lull, which was
used in comparing trades. At the beginning of the respite Sugar was selling
at 155, for in that quarter-hour of madness it had broken from 210 to 155,
but when the ten minutes had elapsed, the stock had worked back to 167.
Barry Conant had again taken the centre of the crowd after hastily scanning
the brief notes handed him by messenger-boys and giving orders to his
lieutenants. He had evidently received reinforcements in the form of
renewed orders from his principals. Many of the faces that fringed the inner
circle of that crowd were frightful to look upon, some white as though just
lifted from hospital pillows, others red to the verge of apoplexy—all
strained as though awaiting the coming of the jury with a life or death
verdict. They all knew that Bob had sold more than a hundred thousand
shares of Sugar upon which the profits must be more than four million
dollars. Would he resume selling or was he through? Was it short stock,
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 selling together, and
under cover of Barry Conant’s movements were Camemeyer and “Standard
Oil” emptying their bag preparatory to the slaughter of the Washington
contingent? All these questions were rushing through the heads of that
crowd of brokers like steam through a boiler, now hot, now cold, but always
at high pressure, for upon the correctness of the answers depended the
fortune of many who breathlessly awaited the renewal or the suspension of

the contest. Even Barry Conant’s usually impassive face wore a tinge of
anxiety.
Indeed, Bob’s was the only one in the centre of that throng that showed
no sign of what was going on behind it. The same cynical smile that had
been there since the opening still played around the corners of his mouth as
he squared himself in front of his opponent. All knew now that he was not
through. Barry Conant had evidently decided to force the fighting, although
more cautiously than before. “67 for a thousand.” One of his lieutenants bid
67 for 500, another 67 for 300, and as Bob had not yet shown his intention
of meeting their bids, 67 for different amounts was heard all over the
crowd. Bob might have been tossing a mental coin to decide the advisability
of buying back what he had sold; he might have been adding up the bids as
they were made. He said nothing for a fraction of 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 swept the circle with a cold-blooded,
“Sold the lots. 5,600 in all.”
“Sixty-seven for a thousand”—again Barry Conant’s bid. “Sold.” “67 for
5,000.” “Sold.” “66 for a thousand.” “Sold.” The drop from five thousand to
one thousand and a dollar a share in Barry Conant’s bids was the mortally
wounded but still game general’s “Sound the retreat.” Bob heard it. “Any
part of 10,000 at 65, 64, 62, 60.” The din was now as fierce as before. The
entire crowd, all but Barry Conant and his lieutenants, seemed to have
concluded that Bob’s renewal of attack meant that his was the winning side,
and those who had been hanging on to their stock, hoping against hope, and
those who were short and had been undecided whether to cover or to hold
on and sell more for greater profits, vied with one another 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 the floor knew that there was a
tremendous amount of Sugar stock in the hands of Washington novices at
speculation and of others who had bought it at high prices. Sugar was now
dropping two, three, five dollars a share between trades, and the panic was
spreading to the other poles, as is always the case, for when there are
sudden large losses in one stock, the losers must throw over the other stocks
they hold to meet this loss, and thus the whole structure tumbles like a
house of cards. Sugar had just crossed 110 when the loud bang of the
president’s gavel resounded through the room. Instantly there was a silence
as of death. All knew the meaning of the sound, the most ominous ever

heard in a stock exchange, calling for the temporary suspension of business
while the president announces the failure 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
crash Bob had started caused further frantic selling, and, as though every
member had employed the lull to refill his lungs, a howl arose that pealed
and wailed to the dome.
I watched Bob closely; in fact, it was impossible for me to take my eyes
off him; he seemed absolutely unmindful of the agonised shrieks about him,
for the frenzied brokers were no longer crying their bids or offers, but
screaming them. He still continued relentlessly to hammer Sugar, offering it
in thousand and tens of thousand lots.
Again and again the gavel fell, and again and again an announcement of
failure was followed by blood-curdling howls. When Sugar struck 80—not
180, but plain 80—it seemed that the last day of stock speculation was at
hand. Announcements were being made every few minutes of the failure of
this bank, the closing of the doors of that trust company. Where would it
end? What power could stop this Niagara of molten dollars? Suddenly
above the tumult rose Bob Brownley’s voice. He must have been standing
on his tiptoes. His hands were raised aloft. He seemed to tower a head
above the mob. His voice was still clear and unimpaired by the terrible
strain of the past two hours. To that mob it must have sounded like the
trumpet of the delivering angel. “80 for any part of 25,000 Sugar.” Instantly
Sugar was hurled at him from all sides of the crowd. He was the only buyer
of moment who had appeared since Sugar broke 125. Barry Conant and his
lieutenants had disappeared like snowflakes at the opening of the door of
the firebox of a locomotive speeding through the storm. In a few seconds
Bob 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 few
thousands of his twenty-five. “85 for 25,000.” A few thousands more. “90
for 25,000.” Still fewer thousands. His bidding was beginning to tell on the
mob. A cry ran through the room into the crowds around the other poles
—“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
a panic on the up side as there had been on the down. Bob Brownley
continued buying Sugar until he had pushed it above 150. He then went
about tallying up his trades. At the end of ten minutes’ calculation he
returned to the centre 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 me
through another two hours like the past two. It seems a hideous dream, a
nightmare. Bob, in the name of God what have you been doing?”
He gave me a wild, awful look of exultation. Sublime triumph shone in
those blazing brown orbs, triumph such as I had never seen in the eyes of
man.
“Jim Randolph, I have been giving Wall Street and its hell ‘System’ a
dose of its own poison, a good full-measure dose. They planned by
harvesting a fresh crop of human hearts and souls on the bull side to give
Friday the 13th a new meaning. Tradition says Friday the 13th is bear
Saints’ day. I believe in maintaining old traditions, so I harvested their
hearts instead. I will tell you about it some time, Jim, but now I must see
Beulah Sands. Jim Randolph, I’ve saved her and her father. I’ve made them
a round three millions and a strong seven millions for myself.”
He almost yelled it as he rushed away and left me dazed, stupefied. A
moment, 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 in
Beulah 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 weeks
ago. You have three millions, and I have seven. Now there is nothing more
but for you to go home to your father, and then come back to me. Back to
me, Beulah, back to me to be my wife!”
He stopped. There was no sound. I waited; then, frightened, I stepped to
the door of Beulah Sands’s office. Bob was standing just inside the
threshold, where he had halted to give her the glad tidings. She had risen
from her desk and was looking at him with an agonised stare. He seemed to
be transfixed by her look, the wild ecstasy of the outburst of love yet
mirrored 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 not
speak. He only stared into her eyes. She was now at his side.
“Bob, you are unnerved,” she said; “you have been through a terrible
ordeal. For an hour I have been reading in the bulletins of the banks and
trust companies that have failed, of the banking-houses that have been
ruined. I have been reading that you did it; that you have made millions—
and I knew it was for me, for father, but in the midst of my joy, my
gratitude, my love—for, oh, Bob, I love you,” she interrupted herself
passionately; “it seems as though I love you beyond the capacity of a
human heart to love. I think that for the right to be yours for one single
moment of this life I would smilingly endure all the pains and miseries of
eternal torture. Yes, Bob, for the right to have you call me yours for only
while I heard the word, I would do anything, Bob, anything that was
honourable.”

She had drawn his head down close to her face, and her great blue eyes
searched his as though they would go to his very soul. She was a child in
her simple appeal for him to allow her to see his heart, to see that there was
nothing black there.
As she gazed, her beautiful hands played through his hair as do a
mother’s through that of the child she is soothing in sickness.
“Bob, speak to me, speak to me,” she begged, “tell me there was no
dishonour in the getting of those millions. Tell me no one was made to
suffer as my father and I have suffered. Tell me that the suicides and the
convicts, the daughters dragged to shame and the mothers driven to the
madhouse as a result of this panic, cannot be charged to anything unfair or
dishonourable that you have done. Bob, oh, Bob, answer! Answer no, or my
heart will break; or if, Bob, you have made a mistake, if you have done that
which in your great desire to aid me and my father seemed justifiable, but
which you now see was wrong, tell it to me, Bob dear, and together we will
try to undo it. We will try to find a way to atone. We will give the millions
to the last, last penny to those upon whom you have brought misery.
Father’s loss will not matter. Together we will go to him and tell him what
we have done, what we have lived through, tell him of our mistake, and in
our agony he will forget his own. For such a horror has my father of
anything dishonourable that he will embrace his misery as happiness when
he knows that his teachings have enabled his daughter to undo this great
wrong. And then, Bob, we will be married, and you and I and father and
mother will be together, and be, oh, so happy, and we will begin all over
again.”
“Beulah, stop; in the name of God, in the name of your love for me, don’t
say 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 have reached 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, and get
down my nerves and get back my head. Then I shall be able to think clear
and true, and I will come back to you, and together we will see if I have
done anything that makes me unfit to touch the cheek and the hands and 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 fires of this

world, and my soul from the torture of the damned, and I promise you that
if I find that I have done wrong, what you call wrong, what your father
would call wrong, I will do what you say to atone.”
He took her head between his hands, gently, reverently, and touching his
lips to her glorious golden hair, he went away.
Beulah Sands turned to me. “Please, Mr. Randolph, go with him. He is
soul-dazed. One can never tell what a heart sorely perplexed will prompt its
owner to do. Often in the night when I have got myself into a fever from
thinking of my father’s situation, I have had awful temptations. The agents
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 might have been
averted if there had been a true friend to stand at the wrung one’s elbow at
the fatal minute of decision and point to the sun behind, just when the black
ahead grew unendurable. Please follow Mr. Brownley that you may be
ready, should his awakening to what he has done become unbearable. Tell
him the dreaded morrows are never as terrible actually as they seem in
anticipation.”
I overtook Bob just outside the office. I did not speak to him, for I
realised 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. The
day’s doing had packed the always-crowded money lane. The newsboys
were shouting afternoon editions. “Terrible panic in Wall Street. One man
against millions. Robert Brownley broke ‘the Street.’ Made twenty millions
in an hour. Banks failed. Wreck and ruin everywhere. President Snow of
Asterfield National a suicide.” Bob gave no sign of hearing. He strode with
a slow, measured gait, his head erect, his eyes staring ahead at space, a man
thinking, thinking, thinking for his salvation. Many hurrying men looked at
him, some with an expression of unutterable hatred, as though they wanted
to attack him. Then again there were those who called him by name with a
laugh of joy; and some turned to watch him in curiosity. It was easy to pick
the wounded from those who shared in his victory, and from those who
knew the frenzied finance buzz-saw only by its buzz. Bob saw none. Where
could he be going? He came to the head of the street of coin and crime and
crossed Broadway. His path was blocked by the fence surrounding old
Trinity’s churchyard. Grasping the pickets in either hand he stared at the

crumbling headstones of those guardsmen of Mammon who once walked
the earth and fought their heart battles, as he was walking and fighting, but
who now knew no ten o’clock, no three, who looked upon the stock-
gamblers and dollar-trailers as they looked upon the worms that
honeycombed their headstones’ bases. What thoughts went through Bob
Brownley’s mind only his Maker knew. For minutes he stood motionless,
then he walked on down Broadway. He went into the Battery. The benches
were crowded with that jetsam and flotsam of humanity that New York’s
mighty sewers throw in armies upon her inland beaches at every sunrise:
Here a sodden brute sleeping off a prolonged debauch, there a lad whose
frankness of face and homespun clothes and bewildered eyes spelt, “from
the farm and mother’s watchful love.” On another bench an Italian woman
who had a half-dozen future dollar kings and social queens about her, and
whose clothes told of the immigrant ship just into port. Bob Brownley
apparently saw none. But suddenly he stopped. Upon a bench sat a sweet-
faced mother holding a sleeping babe in her arms, while a curly-pated boy
nestled his head in her lap and slept through the magic lanes and fairy
woods of dreamland. The woman’s face was one of those that blend the
confidence of girlhood with the uncertainty of womanhood. ’Twas a pretty
face, which had been plainly tagged by its Maker for a light-hearted trip
through this world, but it had been seared by the iron of the city.
“Mr. Brownley—” She started to rise.
He gently pushed her back with a “hush,” unwilling to rob the sleepers of
their heaven.
“What are you doing here, Mrs.——?” He halted.
“Mrs. Chase. Mr. Brownley, when I went away from Randolph &
Randolph’s office I married John Chase; you may remember him as
delivery clerk. I had such a happy home and my husband was so good; I did
not have to typewrite any 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
to see. Don’t mind me; tell me your story. It may do you good; it may do
me good; yes, it may do me good.”

I had dropped into a seat a few feet away. Both were too much occupied
with their own thoughts to notice me or any one else. I could not overhear
their conversation, but long afterward, when I mentioned our old
stenographer, Bessie Brown, to Bob, he told me of the incident at the
Battery. Her husband, after their marriage, had become infected with the
stock-gambling microbe, the microbe that gnaws into its victim’s mind and
heart 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 had lost his
position in disgrace and had landed in the bucket-shop, the sub-cellar pit of
the big Stock Exchange hell. From there a week before he had been sent to
prison for theft, and that morning she had been turned into the street by her
landlord. I saw Bob take from his pocket his memorandum-book, write
something upon a leaf, tear it out and hand it to the woman, touch his hat,
and before she could stop him, stride away. I saw her look at the paper, clap
her hands to her forehead, look at the paper 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 the eyes of all, drop upon her knees in prayer. How
long she prayed I do not know. I only know that as I followed Bob I looked
back and the woman was still upon her knees. I thought at the time how
queer and unnatural the whole thing seemed. Later, I learned to know that
nothing is queer and unnatural in the world of human suffering; that great
human suffering turns all that is queer and unnatural into commonplace.
Next day Bessie Brown came to our office to see Bob. Not being able to get
at him she asked for me.
“Mr. Randolph, tell me, please, what shall I do with this paper?” she said.
“I met Mr. Brownley in the Battery yesterday. He saw I was in distress and
he gave me this, but I cannot believe he meant it,” and she showed me an
order on Randolph & Randolph for a thousand dollars. I cashed her check
and she went away.
From the Battery Bob sought the wharves, the Bowery, Five Points, the
hothouses of the under-worldlings of America. He seemed bent on picking
out the haunts of misery in the misery-infested metropolis of the new world.
For two hours he tramped and I followed. A number of times I thought 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 its outcome might
depend Bob’s salvation. Some seek the quiet of the woods, the soothing
rustle of the leaves, the peaceful ripple of the brook when battling for their

soul, but Bob’s woods appeared to be the shadowy places of misery, his
rustling leaves the hoarse din of the multitude, and his brook’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 his course. The hand
of the clock on Trinity’s steeple pointed to four as we again approached the
office of Randolph & Randolph. Bob was now moving with a long, hurried
stride, as though consumed with a fever of desire to get to Beulah Sands.
For the last fifteen minutes I had with difficulty kept him in sight. Had he
arrived at a decision, and if so, what was it? I asked 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 there
but a moment when I heard deep, guttural groans. I listened. The sound
came louder than before. It came from Beulah Sands’s office. With a bound
I was at the open door. My God, the sight that met my gaze! It haunts me
even now when years have dulled its vividness. The beautiful, quiet, gray
figure 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. Her elbows
rested on the desk; in her hand was an afternoon paper that she had
evidently been reading when Bob entered. God knows how long she had
been reading it before he came. Bob was kneeling at the side of her chair,
his hands clasped and uplifted in an agony of appeal that was supplemented
by the awful groans. His face showed unspeakable terror and entreaty; the
eyes were bursting from their sockets and were riveted on hers as those of a
man in a dungeon might be fixed upon an approaching spectre of one whom
he had murdered. His chest rose and fell, as though trying to burst some
unseen bonds that were crushing out his life. With every breath would come
the awful groan that had first brought me to him. Beulah Sands had half
turned her face until her eyes gazed into Bob’s with a sweet, childish
perplexity. I looked at her, surprised that one whom I had always seen so
intelligently masterful should be passive in the face of such anguish. Then,
horror of horrors! I saw that there was something missing from her great
blue eyes. I looked; gasped. Could it possibly be? With a bound I was at her
side. I gazed again into those eyes which that morning had been all that was
intelligent, all that was godlike, all that was human. Their soul, their life
was gone. Beulah Sands was a dead woman; not dead in body, but in soul;
the magic spark had fled. She was but an empty shell—a woman of living
flesh and blood; but the citadel of life was empty, the mind was gone. What

had been a woman was but a child. I passed my hand across my now damp
forehead. I closed my eyes and opened them again. Bob’s figure, with
clasped, uplifted hands, and bursting eyes, was still there. There still
resounded through the room the awful guttural groans. Beulah Sands
smiled, the smile of an infant in the cradle. She took one beautiful hand
from the paper and passed it over Bob’s bronzed cheek, just as the infant
touches its mother’s face with its chubby fingers. In my horror I almost
expected to hear the purling of a babe. My eyes in their perplexity must
have wandered from her face, for I suddenly became aware of a great black
head-line spread across the top of the paper that she had been reading:

“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
my heart, into all my soul. A frenzied-finance harvest scene with its gory
crop; in the centre one living-dead, part of the picture, yet the ghost left to
haunt the painters, one of whom was already cowering before the black and
bloody canvas.
Well did the word-artist who wrote over the door of the madhouse, “Man
can suffer only to the limit, then he shall know peace,” understand the

wondrous wisdom of his God. Beulah Sands had gone beyond her limit and
was at peace.
The awful groaning stopped and an ashen pallor spread over Bob
Brownley’s face. 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 lifted his head, while the sweet woman-child knelt and covered his
face with kisses, 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 my hand upon Bob’s heart and felt its beats grow stronger, as I
listened to Beulah Sands’s childish voice, joyously confident, as it called
upon the one thing left of her old world, some of my terror passed. In its
place came a great mellowing sense of God’s marvellous wisdom. I thought
gratefully 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 to sink
until it rested in Beulah’s lap, and from his calm and steady breathing I
could see that he had safely passed a crisis, that at least he was not in the
clutches of death, as I had at first feared.
Bob slept. Beulah Sands ceased her calling and with a smile raised her
fingers to her lips and softly said, “Hush, my Bob’s asleep.” Together we
held vigil over our sleeping lover and friend, she with the happiness of a
child who had no fear of the awakening, I with a silent terror of what should
come next. I had seen one mind wafted to the unknown that day. Was it to
have a companion to cheer and solace it on its far journey to the great
beyond? How long we waited Bob’s awakening I could not tell. The clock’s
hands said an hour; it seemed to me an age. At last his magnificent
physique, his unpoisoned blood and splendid brain pulled him through to
his new world of mind and heart torture. His eyelids lifted. He looked at
me, then at Beulah Sands, with eyes so sad, so awful in their perplexed
mournfulness, that I almost wished they had never opened, or had opened 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
bent over and kissed him on the eyes again and again with the loving ardour
a child bestows upon its pets.
He slowly rose to his feet. I could see from his eyes and the shudder that
went over him as he caught sight of the paper on the desk that he was

himself; that memory of the happenings of the day had not fled in his sleep.
He rose to his full height, his head went up, and his shoulders back, but
only from habit and for an instant. Then he folded Beulah Sands to his
breast and dropped his head upon her shoulder. He sobbed like a father with
the corpse of his child.
“Why, Bob, my Bob, is this the way you treat your Beulah when she’s let
you sleep so your beautiful eyes would be pretty for the wedding? Is this
the 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 the absolute
deadness of this woman. From the first look I had known that her mind had
fled, but knowledge is not always realisation. She did not even know who I
was. Her mind was dead to all but the man she loved, the man who through
all those long days of her suffering she had silently worshiped. To all but
him she was new-born.
At the sound of “wedding,” “church,” Bob’s head slowly rose from her
shoulder. I saw his decision the instant I caught his eye; I realised the
uselessness of opposing it, and, sick at heart and horrified, I listened as he
said in a voice now calm and soothing as that of a father to his child, “Yes,
Beulah, my darling, I have slept too long. Bob has been naughty, but we
will make up for lost time. Get your hat and cloak and we’ll hurry to the
church or we will be late.”
With a laugh of joy she followed him to the closet where hung the little
gray turban and the pretty gray jacket. He took them from their peg and
gave 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
minister to marry us. It is best, best. It is right. It is as God would have it, or
I 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, of everything, Jim,
but me. I must try to win her back for herself, or to make 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 the
drop-in-bound-out little roulette ball, was told by a fellow victim, as his last
dollar went to the relentless tiger’s maw, that the keeper’s foot was upon an
electric button which enabled him to make the ball drop where his stake
was not. He simply said, “Thank God. I thought that prince of cheats, Fate,
who all through life has had his foot on the button of my game, was the one
who did the trick.” Long suffering had driven the old gambler to the loser’s
bible, Philosophy! Cheated by man’s device, he knew he 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
the fact that he had been robbed by means of dice loaded by man, but when
Fate pressed the button he saw that his man-made hell was but a feeble
imitation, and—was satisfied, as whoever knows the game of life is
satisfied, because—he must be. Bob’s strong head bowed, his iron will bent,
and meekly his soul murmured, “Thy will be done.”
That night he married Beulah Sands. The minister who united the grown-
up man and the woman who was as a new-born babe saw nothing
extraordinary in the match. He murmured to me, who acted as best man to
the groom, maid of honour to the bride, and father and mother to both, “We
see strange sights, we ministers of the great city, Mr. Randolph. The sweet
little lady appears to be a trifle scared.” My explanation that she and Mr.
Brownley were the only survivors of the awful tragedies of the day was
sufficient. He was satisfied when he got no other response to his question,
“Do you take this man to be your wedded husband?” than a sweet childish
smile as she snuggled closer to Bob.
Bob and his bride went South to his mother and sisters the next day. He
left 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 from

the balance the notes he had given me a few weeks before. There remained
something over $5,000,000 for himself.
The leading Wall Street paper, in its preachment on the panic, wound up
with:

“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 five
to 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
to the funeral. After the old judge and his victims had been laid away and
the relatives had gathered in the library of the great white Sands mansion,
he explained their kinswoman’s condition and told them that she was 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 had been
trustee. Before he went back to his mother’s, Bob had turned a great
calamity into an occasion for something near rejoicing. Judge Sands and his
family were very dear to the people of the section, but his misfortune had
threatened such wide-spread ruin that the unlooked-for recovery of a
million and a half was a godsend that made for happiness.
Two days after the funeral Bob’s dearest hope fled. He had ordered all
things at the Sands plantation put in their every-day condition. Beulah
Sands’s uncles, aunts, and cousins had arranged to welcome her and to try
by every means in their power to coax back her lost mind. They assured
Bob that, barring the absence of Beulah’s father, mother, and sister, there
would not be a memory-recaller missing. Bob and his wife landed from the
river packet at the foot of the driveway, which led straight from the landing
to the vine-covered, white-pillared portico. Bob’s agony must have been
awful when his wife clapped her hands in childish joy as she exclaimed,
“Oh, Bob, what a pretty place!” She gave no sign that she had ever seen the
great entrance, through which she had come and gone from her babyhood.
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 there came no sign of
recognition, nothing but childish pleasure. She looked at her 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 a last hope, they
led in her old black foster-mother, who had nursed her in babyhood, who
was the companion of her childhood and the pet of her womanhood. There
was not a dry eye in the library when she met the old mammy’s outburst of
joy with the puzzled gaze of the child who does not understand. The grief of
the old negress was pitiful as she realised that she was a stranger to her
“honey bird.” The child seemed perplexed at her grief. It was plain to all
that the Sands home meant nothing to the last of the judge’s family.
Bob brought her back to New York and besought the aid of the medical
experts of America and of the Old World to regain that which had been
recalled by its Maker. The doctors were fascinated with this new phase of
mind blight, for in some particulars Beulah’s case was unlike any known
instances, but none gave hope. All agreed that some wire connecting heart
and brain had burned out when the cruel “System” threw on a voltage
beyond the wire’s capacity to transmit. All agreed that the woman-child

wife would never grow older unless through some mental eruption beyond
human power to produce. Some of the medical men pointed to one
possibility, but that one was too terrible for Bob to entertain.
The first anniversary of their marriage found Bob and his wife settled in
their new Fifth Avenue mansion. He had bought and torn down two old
houses between Forty-second and Forty-third Streets and had erected a
palace, the inside of which was unique among all New York’s unusual
structures. The first and second floors were all that refined taste and
unlimited expenditure of money could produce. Nothing on those splendid
floors told of the strange things above. A sedate luxury pervaded the
drawing-rooms, library, and dining-room. Bob said to me, in taking me
through them, “Some day, Jim, Beulah may recover, may come back to me,
and I want to have everything as she would wish, everything as she would
have had it if the curse had never come.” The third floor was Beulah’s. A
child’s dainty bedroom; two nurses’ rooms adjoining; a nursery, with a
child’s small schoolroom and a big playroom, with dolls and doll houses,
child’s toys of every description in abandon, as though their owner were in
fact but a few years old. Across the hall were three offices, exact duplicates
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 to realise that I was
not where the gruesome happenings of a year before had taken place. Bob
had reproduced to the minutest details our down-town workshop. Standing
in the door of Beulah Sands’s office I faced the flat desk at which she had
sat the afternoon when I first saw that hideous result of the work of the
“System.” I could almost see the little gray figure holding the afternoon
paper. In horror my eyes sought the floor at the 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 seemed to hear again those awful groans.
“Jim,” Bob said, “I have a haunting idea that some day Beulah will wake
and look around and think she has been but a few minutes asleep. If she
should, she must have nothing to disabuse her mind until we break the news
to her. I have instructed her nurses, one or the other of whom never loses
sight of her night or day, to win her to the habit of spending her time at her
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 and house
until I can get to her. Here comes Beulah now.”

Out of the nursery came a laughing, happy child-woman. In spite of her
finely developed, womanly figure, which had lost nothing of its wonderful
beauty, 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 of
Randolph & Randolph; in spite of the close-fitting gray gown with dainty
turned-over lace collar, I could hardly bring myself to believe that she was
anything but a young child. With an eager look and a happy laugh she went
to Bob and throwing her arms about his neck, covered his face with kisses.
“Good Bob has come back to play with Beulah,” she said, “She knew he
would. They told Beulah Bob had gone away to the woods to gather pretty
flowers. Beulah knew if Bob had gone to the woods he would have taken
Beulah with him. Now Bob must play school with Beulah.” She sat at her
desk 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 played
scholar and teacher by turns with all the patience of a fond father. With
difficulty 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 the office.
The Exchange saw less. He had wandered in upon the floor two or three
times, but did no business and seemed to take but little interest.
“The Street” knew Bob had married the daughter of Judge Lee Sands, the
victim of Tom Reinhart’s cold-blooded Seaboard Air Line deal. Otherwise it
knew nothing of the affair. His friends never met his wife. Occasionally
they would pass the Brownley carriage on the avenue or in the park and,
taking it for granted that the beautiful woman was Mrs. Brownley, they
thought Bob a lucky fellow. It seemed quite natural that his wife should
choose seclusion after the awful tragedy at her home in Virginia. But they
could not understand why, with such cause for mourning, the exquisite
figure beside Bob in the victoria should always be garbed in gray. After a
while it was whispered that there was something wrong in Bob’s household.
Then his friends and acquaintances ceased to whisper or to think of his
affairs. With all New York’s bad points—and they are as plentiful as her
church spires and charity bazaars—she has one offsetting virtue. If a
dweller in her midst chooses to let New York alone, New York is willing to
reciprocate. In her most crowded fashionable districts a person may come
and go for a lifetime, and none in the block in which he dwells will know
when his coming and going ceases. When a New Yorker reads in his

newspaper of the man who lives next door to him, “murdered and his body
discovered by the gas man” or the tax collector, the butcher or the baker, as
the case may be, he never thinks he may have been remiss in his
neighbourly duties. There is no such word as “neighbour” in the New York
City dictionary. It may have been there once, but, if so, it was long ago used
as a stake for the barbed-wire fence of exclusive keep-your-distance-we-
keep-our-distance-until-we-know-youness. It is told of a minister from the
rural districts, an old-fashioned American, who came to New York to take
charge of a parish, that he started out to make his calls and was seized in the
hall of what in civilisation would have been his next-door neighbour. He
was rushed away to Bellevue for examination as to sanity. The verdict was:
“Insane. Had no letter of introduction and was not in the set.”
Shortly after the first anniversary of his wedding Bob gave up his office
with Randolph & Randolph and opened one for himself. He explained that
he was giving up his commission business to devote all his time to personal
trading. With the opening of his new office he again became the most active
man on the floor. His trading was intermittent. For weeks he would not be
seen at the Exchange or on “the Street.” Then he would return and, after
executing a series of brilliant trades, which were invariably successful, he
would again disappear. He soon became known as the luckiest operator in
Wall Street, and the beginning of his every new deal was the signal for his
fast-growing following to tag on.
From time to time I learned that Beulah Sands was making no real
improvement, though in some details she had learned as a child learns. But
there was no indication that she would ever regain her lost mind.
Strange stories of Bob’s doings began to seep into my office. For long
periods he would disappear. Neither the nurses in charge of his wife, nor his
brother, mother, and sisters, for whom he had purchased a mansion a few
blocks above his own, would hear a word from him. Then he would return
as suddenly as he had disappeared, and his wild eyes and haggard face
would tell of a prolonged and desperate soul struggle. He drank often now,
a habit he had never before indulged in.
For ten days before the second anniversary of his marriage he had been
missing. On the morning of the anniversary he appeared at the Exchange,
wild-eyed and dare-devil reckless. The market had been advancing for
weeks and was at a high level. Tom Reinhart and his branch of the

“System” were working out a new fleecing of the public in Union and
Northern Pacific. At the strike of the gong Bob took possession of the
Union Pacific pole and in thirty minutes had precipitated a panic by his
merciless selling. Our house was heavily interested in the Pacifics, although
not in connection with Reinhart and his crowd. As soon as I got word that
Bob was the cause of the slaughter, I rushed over to the Exchange and
working my way into the crowd, I begged a word with him. He had broken
both stocks over fifty points 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 my appeal, but finally he said, “Jim, it is too bad to let
up. I had determined to rub this devilish institution off the map, but if it
really is a case of injury to the house, it’s my opportunity to do something
for you who have done so much for me, so here goes.” He threw himself
into the Union Pacific crowd, first giving an order to a group of his brokers,
who jumped for a number of other poles. Almost instantly the panic was
stayed and stocks were bounding upward two to five points at a leap. Bob
continued buying Union Pacific and his brokers other stocks in unlimited
quantities. Nothing like such a quick turn of the market had been seen
before. His power to absorb stocks seemed to be boundless. It was
estimated that personally and through his brokers he bought over half a
million shares before he joined me and left the Exchange.
I looked at him in wonderment. “Bob, I cannot understand you,” I said at
last as we turned out of Broad Street into Wall. “It seems as if you work
with magic. Everything you touch turns to gold.”
He wheeled on me. “Yes, Jim, you are right. Gold, heartless, soulless
gold. But what is the dross good for? What is it good for to me? To-day I
suppose I have made the biggest one-man killing in the history of ‘the
Street.’ I must be an easy twenty-five millions richer in gold than I was this
morning, and I had enough then to dam the East River and a good section of
the North. But tell me, Jim, tell me, what can it buy in this world 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 fifty millions, and I know how
to get fifty or five hundred and fifty more any time I care to take them, and
I have only physical and mental hell. No beggar 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 is robbing me of my faith in God—where can I
buy a little, just a little happiness with all this cursed yellow dirt? What will

it get me in the next world, Jim Randolph, what will it get me? If I had died
when I was poor, I think you will agree with me that, if there is a heaven, I
should have stood an even chance of getting there. Now on a day like to-
day, when you see the results of my work, the results of my handling of
unlimited gold, you must agree that if I were taken off I should stand more
than an even show of landing in hell where the sulphur is thickest and the
flames are hottest.”
We were at the entrance of Randolph & Randolph’s office as he poured
out this terrible torrent of bitterness. He glared at me as a dungeon prisoner
might glare at his keeper for his answer to “Where can I find liberty?” I had
no words to answer him. As I noted the awful changes his new life was
making in every line of his face, the rigid hardness, the haunted, nervous
look of desperation, which seemed a forerunner of madness, I could not see,
either, where his millions brought any happiness. His hair, which once was
smooth and orderly, hung over his forehead in an unparted mass of tangled
curls, and here and there showed a streak of white. Bob Brownley was still
handsome, even more fascinating than before the mercury entered his soul,
but it was that wild, awful beauty of the caged lion, lashing himself into
madness with memories of his lost freedom.
“Jim,” he went on, when he saw I could not answer, “I guess you don’t
know where I can swap the yellow mud for balm of Gilead. I won’t bother
you with my troubles any longer. I will go up-town and see the little girl
whose happiness Tom Reinhart needed in his business. I will go up and
show her the pictures in this week’s Collier’s of the fine hospital for
incurables that Reinhart has so generously and nobly built at a cost of two
and a half millions! The little girl may think better of Reinhart when she
knows that her father’s money was put to such good use. Who knows but
the great finance king may dedicate it as the ‘Judge Lee Sands Home’ and
carve over the entrance a bas-relief of her father, mother, and sister with
Hope, Faith, and Charity coming from the mouths of their hanging severed
heads?”
Bob Brownley laughed a horrible ringing laugh as he uttered these awful
words. Then he beat his hand down on my shoulders as he said in a hoarse
voice, “Jim, but for you I should have had crimps in that jackal
philanthropist’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 lives he

will be fitter for the crimping. Within the short two years since he finished
grilling Judge Sands’s soul, he has put himself in better form to appreciate
his reward. I see by the press that at last his aristocratic wife has gold-cured
Newport of its habit of dating back the name Reinhart to her scullionhood,
and it has taken her into the high-instep circle. I read the other day of his
daughter’s marriage to some English nob, and of the discovery of the
ancient Reinhart family tree and crest with the mailed 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 I passed
under the old black-and-gold sign my uncle and my father had nailed over
the office entrance in an age now dead, an age when Wall Street men talked
of honour and gold, not gold and more gold.
In telling my wife of the day’s happenings I could not refrain from giving
vent to the feelings that consumed me. “Kate, Bob will surely do something
awful one of these days. I can see no hope for him. He grows more and
more the madman as he broods over his horrible situation. The whole thing
seems incredible to me. Never was a human being in such perpetual living
purgatory—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
have read or you have told me, how he creates those panics and makes all
that money.”
“No one has ever been able to figure it out,” I answered. “I understand
the stock business, but I cannot for the life of me see how he does it. He has
none of the money powers in league with him, that’s sure, for in the mood
he has been in during the past two years it would be impossible for him to
work with them, even if his salvation depended on it. The mention of any of
the big ‘System’ men drives him to a fury. He has to-day made more money
than any one man ever made in a day since the world began, and he had
only commenced his work when he quit to please me. As I stand in the
Exchange and watch him do it, it seems commonplace and simple.
Afterward it is beyond my comprehension. At the gait he is going, the
Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, and Gould fortunes combined will look tiny in
comparison with the one he will have in a few years. It is beyond my power

of figuring out, and it gives me a headache every time I try to see through
it.”

Chapter VIII.

A number of times during the following year, and finally on the
anniversary of the Sands tragedy, Bob carried the Exchange to the verge of
panic, only to turn the market and save “the Street” in the end. His profits
were fabulous. Already his fortune was estimated to be between two and
three hundred millions, one of the largest in the world. His name had
become one of terror wherever stocks were dealt in. Wall Street had come
to regard his every deal, from the moment that he began operations, as
inevitably successful. Now and again he would jump into the market when
some of the plunging cliques had a bear raid under way, and would put
them to rout by buying everything in sight and bidding up prices until it
looked as though he intended to do as extraordinary work on the up-side as
he was wont to do on the down. At such times he was the idol of the
Exchange, which worships the man who puts prices up as it hates him who
pulls them down. Once when war news flashed over the wires from
Washington and rumour had the Cabinet members, Senators, and
Congressmen selling the market short on advance information, when the
“Standard Oil” banks had put up money rates to 150 per cent, and a crash
seemed inevitable, Bob suddenly smashed the loan market by offering to
lend one hundred millions at 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 to disastrous rout and caused them to lose millions. He
continued his operations with increasing violence and increasing profits up
to the fourth anniversary of the tragedy. On the intervening anniversary I
had been compelled by self-interest and fear that he would really pull down
the entire Wall Street structure, to rush in and fairly drag him off. But with
his growing madness my influence was waning. Each raid it was with
greater difficulty that I got his ear.
Finally, on the fourth anniversary, in a panic that seemed to be running
into something more terrible than any previous, he savagely refused to

accede 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
the floor that I was the only one who could do anything with him in his
frenzies, and my pleading with him in the lobby was watched by the
members of the Exchange with triple eyed suspense. When it was clear
from his emphatic gestures and raised voice—for he was in a reckless mood
from drink and madness and took no pains to disguise his intentions—that I
could not prevail upon him, there was a frantic rush for the poles to throw
over stocks in advance of him. Suddenly, after I had turned from him in
despair, there flashed into my mind an idea. The situation was desperate. I
was dealing with a madman, and I decided that I was justified in making
this last try. I rushed back to him. “Bob, good-bye,” I whispered in his ear,
“good-bye. In ten minutes you will get word that Jim Randolph has cut his
throat!” He stopped as though I had plunged a knife into him, struck his
forehead a resounding blow, and into his wild brown eyes 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 for all
the money in the world, not even for revenge. Wait here, Jim.” He yelled for
his brokers, and several rushed to him from different parts of the room. He
sent them back into the crowd while he dashed for the Amalgamated-pole.
The day was saved.
Presently he came back to me. “Jim, I must have a talk with you. Come
over to my office.” When we got there he turned the key and stood in front
of me. His great eyes looked full into mine. In college days, gazing into
their brown depths, by some magic I seemed to see the heroes and heroines
of always happy-ending tales, as the child sees enchanted creatures far back
in the burning Yule log flames. But there were no joyous beings in the
haunted depths of Bob’s eyes that day.
“Jim, you gave me an awful scare,” he said brokenly. “Don’t ever do it
again. I have little left to live for. To be sure I have some feeling for mother,
Fred, and sisters. But for you I have a love second only to that I should 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, would have been the last
straw. My life is purgatory. Beulah is only an ever-present curse to me—a

ghost that rends my heart and soul, one minute with a blind frenzy to
revenge her wrongs, the next with an icy remorse that I have not already
done so. If I did not have her, perhaps in time I could forget; perhaps I
might lay out some scheme to help poor devils whose poverty makes life
unendurable, and with the millions I have taken from that main shaft of hell
I might do things that would at least bring quiet to my soul; but it is
impossible with the living corpse of Beulah Sands before me every minute
and that devil machinery whirling in my brain all the time the song,
‘Revenge her and her father, revenge yourself.’ It is impossible to give it up,
Jim. I must have revenge. I must stop this machinery that is smashing up
more American hearts and souls each year than all the rest of earth’s
grinders combined. Every day I delay I become more fiendish in my
desires. Jim, don’t think I do not know that I have literally turned into a
fiend. Whenever of late I see myself in the mirror, I shudder. When I think
of what I was when your father stood us up in his office and started us in
this heart-shrivelling, soul-callousing business, and what I am now, I cannot
keep the madness down except with rum. You know what it means for me
to say this, me who started with all the pride of a Brownley; but it is so,
Jim. The other night I went home with my soul frozen with thoughts of the
past and with my brain ablaze with 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 that sweet child’s laugh and clapping her hands said,
‘Bob is so good to play with Beulah,’ and then I thought of that devil
Reinhart and the other fiends of the ‘System’ being left to continue their
work unhindered and I could not do it. I must have revenge; I must smash
that heart-crushing machinery. Then I can go, and take Beulah with me.
Now, Jim, let us have it clearly understood once and for all.”
Remorse and softness were past; he was the Indian again. “I am going to
wreck that hell-annex some day, and that some day will be the next time I
start in. Don’t argue with me, don’t misunderstand me. To-day you stopped
me. 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 be there
whenever I start in again. It loses nothing of its fiendishness, none of its
destructive powers by grinding, but, on the contrary, as you know, it
increases its speed every day it runs. Now, Jim Randolph, I want to tell you
that you must get yours and the house’s affairs in such shape that 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’ will have 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 their savings and their
manhood and womanhood and give them in exchange unadulterated
torment. I am going to be fair with you, Jim; this is the last time I will
discuss the subject. After this you must take your chance with the rest of
those who have to do with the cursed business. When I strike again, none
will be spared. I will wreck ‘the Street’, and the innocent will go down with
the guilty, if they have any stocks on hand at that time.
“My power, Jim, is unlimited; nothing can stay it. I am not going to
explain any further. You have seen me work. You must know that my power
is greater than the ‘System’s,’ and you and I and ‘the Street’ have always
known that the ‘System’ is more powerful than the Government, more
powerful than are the courts, legislatures, Congress, and the President of the
United States combined, that it absolutely controls the foundation on which
they rest—the money of the nation. But my power is greater, a thousand,
yes, a million times greater than theirs. Jim, they say that I have made more
money than any man in the world. They say that I have five hundred
millions of dollars, but the fools don’t keep track of my movements. They
only know that I have pulled five hundred millions from my open whirls,
the ones they have had an opportunity to keep tab on. But I tell you that I
have made even more in my secret deals than the amount they have seen me
take. I have had my agents with my capital in every deal, every steal the
‘System’ has rigged up. The world has been throwing up 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 the coarseness of my language. I
have learned to call this game of ours by its right 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
50 and 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 up the hundreds of millions on the slump. The papers and the
market letters one morning said it was ‘Standard Oil’; the next, that it was
Morgan; then it 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 be making millions in the minds of the world, even though they never get
any of the money. Dick Turpin and Jonathan Wild never were fonder of
having the daring hold-ups that other highwaymen perpetrated laid to their
doors, than are these modern bandits of being credited with ruthless deeds
that they did not commit. But Jim, ’twas I, ’twas I who sold Pennsylvania
every morning for a year, while the selling was explained by the press as
‘Cassatt cutting down Gould’s telegraph poles. Gould and old man
Rockefeller selling Pennsylvania to get even.’ Jim Randolph, I have to-day
a billion dollars, not the Rockefeller or Carnegie kind, but a real billion. If I
had no other power but the power to call to-morrow for that billion in cash,
it would be sufficient to lay in waste the financial world before to-morrow
night. You are welcome, Jim, to any part of that billion, and the more you
take the happier you will make me, but when I strike 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 German
expert on brain disorders had held out hope that a six month’s treatment at
his sanitarium in Berlin might aid in restoring her mind. They returned the
following August. The trip had been fruitless. It was plain to me that Bob
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 time
went by and there was no sign of his confidence-disturbing influence in the
market, the “System” began to bring out its deferred deals. Times were ripe
for setting up the most wildly inflated stock lamb-shearing traps. It had
been advertised throughout the world that Tom Reinhart, now a two-
hundred-time millionaire, was to consolidate his and many other enterprises
into one gigantic trust with twelve billions of capital. His Union and
Southern Pacific Railroads, his coal and Southern lines, together with his
steamship company and lead, iron, and copper mines, were to be merged
with the steel, traction, gas, and other enterprises he owned jointly with
“Standard Oil.” Some of the railroads owned by Rockefeller and his pals, in
which Reinhart had no part, were to go in too, and with these was to unite
that mother hog of them all, “Standard Oil” itself. The trust was to be an
enormous holding company, the like of which had until then not even been
dreamed of by the most daring stock manipulators. The “System’s” banks,
as well as trust and insurance companies throughout the country, had for a
long time been getting into shape by concentrating the money of the

country for this monster trust. It was newspaper and news bureau gossip
that Reinhart and his crowd had bought millions of shares of the different
stocks involved in the deal, and it was common knowledge that upon its
successful completion Reinhart’s fortune would be in the neighbourhood of
a billion. On October 1st the certificate of the Anti-People’s Trust,
$12,000,000,000 capital, 120,000,000 shares, were listed upon the New
York, London, and Boston Stock Exchanges, and the German and French
Bourses, and trading in them started off fast and furious at 106. The claim
that one billion of the twelve billions capital had been set aside to be used in
protecting and manipulating the stock in the market, had been so widely
advertised that even the most daring plunger 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 rudely
awakened to a realisation that their savings were invested in the combined
American industries at vastly inflated values, that the few had all the real
money, and that any attempt upon the people’s part to regulate and control
the new system of robbery, would be fraught with unparalleled disaster—
not to the “System,” but to the people.
Since Bob’s return from Europe I had seen him but a few times. Up to
October 1st he had not been near the Stock Exchange or “the Street.”
Shortly after the listing of the “People Be Damned,” as “the Street” had
dubbed the new trust, he began to show up at his office regularly. This was
the condition of affairs when Fred Brownley called me up on the telephone,
as I related at the beginning of my story, which I did not realise I had been
so long in telling.
My thoughts had been chasing each other with lightning-like rapidity
back over the last five years and the fifteen before them, and each thought
deepened the black mist over my present mental vision. In the midst of my
reflections my telephone rang again.
“Mr. Randolph, for Heaven’s sake have you done nothing yet?” It was
Fred Brownley’s voice. “Things are frightful here. Bob’s brokers are selling
stocks at five and ten thousand-lot clips. Barry Conant is leading Reinhart’s
forces. It is said he has the pool’s protection order in Anti-People’s and that
it is unlimited, but Bob has the Reinhart crowd pretty badly scared. Swan
has just finished giving Conant a hundred thousand off the reel in 10,000
lots, and he told me a moment ago he was going over to get Bob himself to

face Barry Conant. They’re down twenty points on the average, although
they haven’t let Anti-People’s break an eighth yet. They have it pegged at
106, but there is an ugly rumour just in that Bob, under cover of a general
attack, is unloading Anti-People’s on to the Reinhart wing for Rogers and
Rockefeller, and the rumour is getting in its work. Even Barry Conant is
growing a bit anxious. The latest talk is that Reinhart is borrowing hundreds
of millions on Anti-People’s, and that his loans are being called in all
directions. Do you know Reinhart is at his place in Virginia and cannot get
here before to-morrow night? If Bob breaks through Anti-People’s peg, it
will be the worst crash yet.”
“All right, Fred,” I answered. “I will go over to Bob’s right now. I hate to
do it, but there is no other hope.”
I dropped the receiver and started for Bob’s office. As I went through his
counting-room one of the clerks said, “They have just broken Anti-People’s
to 90 on a bulletin that Tom Reinhart’s wife and only daughter have been
killed in an automobile accident at their place in Virginia. They first had it
that Reinhart himself was killed. That has been corrected, although the
latest word is that he is prostrated.”
I rapped on Bob’s private-office door. I felt the coming struggle as I
heard his hoarse bellow, “Come in.” He stood at the ticker, with the tape in
one hand, while with the other he held the telephone receiver to his ear. 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, his shoulders thrown
back as if he were withstanding the rush of the Stock Exchange hordes, his
eyes afire with a sullen, smouldering blaze, his jaw was set in a way that
brought into terrible relief the new, hard lines of desperation that had
recently come into his face. His great chest was rising and falling as though
he were engaged in a physical struggle; his perfect-fitting, heavy black
Melton cutaway coat, thrown back from the chest, and a low, turned-down,
white collar formed the setting for a throat and head that reminded one of a
forest monarch at bay on the mountain crag awaiting the coming of the
hounds and hunters.
I hesitated at the threshold to catch my breath, as I took in the terrific
figure. Had Bob Brownley been an enemy of mine I should have backed out
in fear, and I do not confess to more than my fair share of cowardice.
Inwardly I thanked God that Bob was in his office instead of on the floor of

the Exchange. His whole appearance was frightful. He showed in every line
and lineament that he was a man who would hesitate at nothing, even at
killing, if he should find a human obstacle in his road and his mind should
suggest murder. He was the personification of the most awful madness.
Even when he caught sight of me, he hardly moved, although my coming
must have been a surprise.
“So it is you, Jim Randolph, is it? What brings you here?” His voice was
hoarse, but it had a metallic ring that went to my marrow. Bob Brownley in
all the years of our friendship had never spoken to me except in kind and
loving 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 plead
again 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. I
loved Bob Brownley. I would have done anything to make him happy,
would willingly have sacrificed my own life to protect his from himself or
others, but this madman, this wild brute, was no more Bob Brownley as I
had known him than the howling northeast gale of December is the gentle,
welcome zephyr of August; and I felt a resentment at his brutal speech that 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 college days.
I said in a firm voice, “Bob, is this the way to talk to me in your own
office?” At any time before, my words and tone would have touched his all-
generous Southern chivalry, but now he said harshly—“To hell with
sentiment. What——” He did not take his eyes from mine, but they told me
that he was listening to a voice in the receiver. Only for a second; then he
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 my
answer. Tell them if Reinhart had ten more wives and daughters and they
were 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 curse his 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’ve got your answer. I wouldn’t let up on that fiendish hyena, not if his
wife and daughter and all the dead wives and daughters of every ‘System’
man came back in their grave clothes and begged. I wouldn’t let up a
share.” I gasped in horror.
“When did those robbers of men and despoilers of women and children
ever let up because of death? When were they ever known to wait even till
the corpse stiffened to pluck out the hearts of the victims? It is my turn now,
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 reached for
the doorknob, but before I could swing the door open Bob was upon me like
a wolf. He grasped me by the shoulders and with the strength of a madman
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
something and, by heaven, you will tell me what it is! You know me; you
are the only human being who does. You know what I was, you see what I
am. You know what they did to me to make me what I am. You know, Jim
Randolph, you know whether I deserved it. You know whether in all my life
up to the day those dollar-frenzied hounds tore my soul, I had done any
man, woman, or child a wrong. You know whether I had, and now you are
going to sneak off and leave me as though I were a cur dog of the
Reinhart-‘Standard Oil’ breed gone mad!”
He was standing over me, a terrible yet a magnificent figure. As he
hurled these words at me, I was sure he had really lost his mind; that I was
in the 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 for Bob,
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 quiet except 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 my own sobs quieted.
I gasped as the lump in my throat choked me, then I slowly raised my eyes.
Bob’s towering figure was in front of me. His head had fallen forward,
and his arms were folded across his breast. But that he stood erect I should

have thought him dead, so still was he. I jumped to my feet and looked into
his face, down which great tears were dropping silently. I touched him on
the shoulder.
“Bob, my dear old chum, Bob, forgive me. For God’s sake, forgive me
for intruding on your misery.”
I looked at him. I will never forget his face. No heartbroken woman’s
could have been sadder. He slowly raised his head, then staggered and
grasped the ticker-stand for support.
“Don’t, Jim, don’t—don’t ask me to forgive you. Oh, Jim, Jim, my old
friend, forgive me for my madness; forget what I said to you, forget the
brute you just saw and think of me as of old, when I would have plucked
out my tongue if I had caught it saying a harsh word to the best and truest
friend man ever had. Jim, forget it all. I was mad, I am mad, I have been
mad for a long time, but it cannot last much longer. I know it can’t, and,
Jim, by all our past love, by the memories of the dear old days at St. Paul’s
and at Harvard, the dear old days of hope and happiness, when we planned
for the future, try to think of me only as you knew 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
few moments before had poured forth a flood of brutal heartlessness.
Bob went to the door. The office was in an uproar. Twenty or thirty of
Bob’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 them coldly.
“Well, what is the trouble? Is it possible we are down to a point where the
Stock Exchange rushes over to a man’s office when his wire happens to
break down?”
They saw his bluff. You cannot deceive Stock Exchange men, at least not
the kind that Bob Brownley employed on panic days, but his coolness
reassured them, and when they saw me it was odds-on that they guessed to
a man why Bob had ignored his wires—guessed that I had been pleading
for the life of “the Street.”
“Well, where do you stand?”

Frank Swan answered for the crowd: “The panic is in full swing. She’s a
cellar-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 broken dam.
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 Street will be
overboard before the close. The governing committee has just called a
meeting to see whether it will not be best to adjourn the Exchange over to-
day and to-morrow.”
Bob listened as if he had been a master at the wheel in a gale, receiving
reports 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 the
ocean’s rage and the wind’s howl, the wheel will answer his hand and the
craft its rudder. “Jim, come over to the Exchange.” The crowd followed
along. “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 you how
sorrowful I am that in my madness I should have so forgotten my
admiration, respect, and love for you, yes, and my gratitude to you, as to
say what I did. I’ll do the only thing I can to atone. I will stop this panic and
undo as much as possible of my work; and now that I have wrecked
Reinhart I am through with this game forever, yes, through forever.”
He pressed my hand in his strong, honest one and strode into the
Exchange ahead of the crowd. All was chaos, although the trading had
toned down to a sullen desperation. So many houses, banks, and trust
companies had failed that no man knew whether the member he had traded
with early in the day would on the morrow be solvent enough to carry out
his trades. The man 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 with his stock again on hand, because of the failure of the
one to whom he had sold, and the price cut in two. The man who was
“short” and who a few minutes before had been eagerly counting his profits
now knew that they had been turned to loss, because the man from whom
he had borrowed his short stocks for delivery would be in no condition to
repay for them, the next day, when they should be returned to him. The
“short” man was himself, therefore, “long” stocks he had bought to cover
his “short” sale. In depressing the price he had been working against his

own pocket instead of against the bulls he had thought he was opposing. All
was confusion and black despair. There is, indeed, no blacker place than the
floor of the Stock Exchange after a panic cyclone has swept it, and is yet
lingering in its corners, while the survivors of its fury do not know whether
or not it will again gather force.

Chapter IX.

The Governing Committee was holding a meeting in its room. Bob
rushed in unceremoniously.
“One word, gentlemen,” he called. “I have more trades outstanding, both
buys and sells, than any other member or house. Before deciding whether to
adjourn in an attempt to save ‘the Street’, I ask your consideration of this
proposition: If the Exchange will suspend operations for thirty minutes, and
allow me to address the members on the floor, I will agree to buy stocks all
around the room, until they have regained at least half their drop—all of it,
if possible. I will buy until I have exhausted to the last hundred my fortune
of a billion dollars. This should make an adjournment unnecessary. I know
that this is a most extraordinary request, but you are confronted with a most
extraordinary situation, the most remarkable in the history of the Stock
Exchange. Already, if what they say on the floor is correct, over two
hundred banks and trust companies throughout the country have gone
under, and new failures are being announced every minute. Half the
members of this and the Boston and Philadelphia Exchanges are insolvent
and have closed their doors, or will close them before three o’clock, and the
shrinkage in values so far reported runs over fifteen billions. Unless
something is done before the close, there will be a similar panic in every
Exchange and Bourse in Europe to-morrow.”
The committee instantly voted to lay the proposition before the full
board. In another minute the president’s gavel sounded, and the floor was
still as a tomb. All eyes were fixed on the president. Every man in that great
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 president spoke:
“Members of the New York Stock Exchange:

“The Governing Committee instructs me to say that Mr. Robert Brownley
has asked that operations be suspended for thirty minutes, in order that he
be allowed to address you. Mr. Brownley has agreed, if this request be
granted, he will upon resumption of operations purchase a sufficient amount
of stock to raise the average price of all active shares at least one-half their
total drop—all of it, if possible. He agrees to buy to the limit of his fortune
of a billion dollars. I now put Mr. Brownley’s request to a vote. All those in
favour of granting it will signify the same 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, in
thirty minutes to the second, I will sound the gavel for the resumption of
business.”
Bob Brownley strode to the place just vacated by the president. The
crowd was growing larger every minute. The ticker was already hissing a
tape biograph of this extraordinary situation in brokerage shops, hotels, and
banks throughout the country, and in a few minutes the news of it would be
in the capitals of Europe. Never before in history did man have such an
audience—the whole civilised world. Already arose from Wall, Broad, and
New Streets, which surround the Exchange, the hoarse bellow of the
gathering hordes. Before the ticker should announce the resumption of
business these would number hundreds of thousands, for the financial
district for more than an hour had been a surging mob.
For once at least the much-abused phrase, “He looked the part,” could be
used in all truthfulness. As Robert Brownley threw back his head and
shoulders and faced that crowd of men, some of whom he had hurt, many of
whom he had beggared, and all of whom he had tortured, he presented a
picture such as a royal lion recently from the jungles and just freed from his
cage might have made. Defiance, deference, contempt, and pity all blended
in his mien, but over all was an I-am-the-one-you-are-the-many atmosphere
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 asked
permission to talk to you for the purpose of showing you how any member
of a great Stock Exchange may at any time do what I have done to-day.
Weigh well what I am about to say to you. During the last quarter of a
century there has grown up in this free and fair land of ours a system by
which the few take from the many the results of their labours. The men who
take have no more license, from God or man, to take, than have those from
whom they filch. They are not endowed by God with superior wisdom, nor
have they performed for their fellow-men any labour or given to them
anything of value that entitles them to what they take. Their only license to
plunder is their knowledge of the system of trickery and fraud that they
themselves have created. No man can gainsay this, for on every side is the
evidence. Men come into Wall Street at sunrise without dollars; before that
same sun sets they depart with millions. So all-powerful has grown the
system of oppression that single men take in a single lifetime all the savings
of a million of their fellows. To-day the people, eighty millions strong, are
slaving for the few, and their pay is their board and keep. I saw this robbery.
I felt the robbers’ scourge. I sought the secret. I found it here, here in this
gambling-hell. I found that the stocks we bought and sold were mere
gambling chips; that the man who had the biggest stack could beat his
opponent off the board; that his opponent was the world, because all men
directly or indirectly played the stock-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 buy more than he could pay for, and the game,
although still a gambling one, would be fair. A few master tricksters, dollar
magicians, long ago seeing this condition, invented the system by which the
people are ruthlessly plundered. The system they invented was simple, so
simple that for a quarter of a century it has remained undiscovered by the
world at large—and even by you, who profess to be experts. No man
thought that a free people who had intended to allow all the equal use of
every avenue for the attainment of wealth, and who intended to provide for
the safeguarding of wealth after it was secured, could be such dolts as to
allow themselves to be robbed of all their accumulated wealth by a device
as simple as that by which children play at blindman’s buff. The process
was no more complex than that employed by the robber of old, who took
the pebbles from the beach, marked them money, and with the money
bought the labour of his fellows, and by the manipulation of that labour and

by turning pebbles into money he took away from the labourer the money
which he had paid them for the labour until all in the land were slaves of the
moneymaker. These few tricksters said: We will arbitrarily manufacture
these chips—stocks. After we have manufactured them, we will sell the
world what the world can pay for, and then by the use of the unlimited
supply 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 are
enslaved. To do this there was one thing besides the manufacturing of the
chips—stocks—that was absolutely necessary—a gambling-hell, the
working of whose machinery would place a selling value upon such chips; a
hell where, after selling the chips, they could be won back. I saw that if
these tricksters were to be routed and their ‘System’ was to be destroyed, it
must be through the machinery of this Stock Exchange. I studied the
machinery, and presently I marvelled that men could for so long have been
asses.
“From the very nature of stock-gambling it is necessary, absolutely
necessary, that it be conducted under certain rules, unchangeable,
unbreakable rules, to attempt to change or break which would destroy
stock-gambling. The foundation rule, the rule absolutely necessary for the
existence of stock-gambling is: Any member of the Stock Exchange can
buy, or sell, between the opening and the closing of the Exchange as many
shares of stock as he cares to. With this rule in force his buying and selling
cannot be restricted to the amount he can take and pay for, or deliver and
receive pay for, because there is not money enough in the world to pay for
what under this same rule can be bought and sold in a single session. This is
because there have been arbitrarily created by these few tricksters many
times more stocks than there is money in existence. The amount of stock
that any man can sell in one session of the Exchange is limited only by the
amount that he can offer for sale, and he can offer any amount his tongue
can utter; and he is not compelled and cannot be compelled to show his
ability to deliver what he has offered for sale until after he has finished
selling, which is the following day. You will ask as I did: Can this be
possible? You will find the answer I found. It is so, and must continue to be
so, or there will be no stock-gambling. Mark me, for this statement is
weighted with the greatest import to you all. A member of this Exchange
can sell as many shares of stock at one session as he cares to offer. If any
attempt is made at the session he sells at to compel him either before or

after he offers to sell to show his ability to deliver, away goes the stock-
gambling structure, because from the very nature of the whole structure of
stock-gambling the same shares are sold and resold many times in each
session and the seller cannot know, much less show, that he can deliver until
he first adjusts with the buyer and the buyer cannot adjust until after he has
become such by buying. If a rule were made compelling a seller to show his
responsibility before selling, every member would have every other
member at his mercy and there could be no stock-gambling. When I had
worked this out, I saw that while the few tricksters of the ‘System’ had a
perfect device for taking from the people their wealth, I had discovered as
perfect a means of taking away from the few the wealth they had secured
from the many. With this knowledge came a conviction that my way was as
honest as the ‘System’s,’ in fact more honest than theirs. They took from the
innocent, I took from the guilty what had already been dishonestly secured.
I determined to put my discovery into practice.
“I might never have done so but for that Sugar panic in which I was
robbed of millions by the ‘System’ through Barry Conant. In that panic the
‘System,’ with its unlimited resources, filched from the people by the
arbitrary manufacture of stocks, and by their manipulation did to me what I
afterward discovered I could do to them, without any resources other than
my right to do business on the floor of this Exchange. You saw the outcome,
in the second Sugar panic, of my first experiment. In a few minutes I
cleared a profit of ten million dollars. I could have made it fifty millions, or
one hundred and fifty, but I was not then on familiar terms with my new
robber-robbing device, and I had yet a heart. To make this ten millions of
money, all that was necessary for me to do was to sell more Sugar than
Barry Conant could buy. This was easy, because Barry Conant, not knowing
of my newly invented trick, could buy only what he could pay for on the
morrow, or, at least, what he believed his clients could pay for; while I, not
intending to deliver what I sold—unless by smashing the price to a point
where I could compel those who had bought to resell to me at millions less
than I sold at—could sell unlimited amounts—literally unlimited amounts.
When Barry Conant had bought all that he thought he could pay for, he was
obliged to beat a retreat in front of my offerings, and I was able to smash,
and smash, until the price was so low that he could not by the use of what
he had bought, as collateral, borrow sufficient to pay me for what I had sold
him. Then he was compelled to turn about and sell what he had bought from

me, and when I had rebought it, for ten millions less than I had sold it for,
the trick had been turned. I had sold him 100,000 shares say at 220. He had
sold them back to me say at 120, and he stood where he had stood at the
beginning. He had none of the 100,000 shares. Both of us stood, so far as
stock was concerned, where we had stood at the beginning, but as to profits
and losses there was this difference: I had ten millions of dollars profits,
while Barry Conant’s clients, the ‘System,’ were ten millions losers—and
all by a trick. The trick did not differ in principle from the one in constant
practice by the ‘System.’ When the ‘System,’ after manufacturing Sugar
stock, sell 100,000 shares to the people 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 into selling the 100,000 shares back to them for
$5,000,000. After they have bought 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 legal crime. I committed no legal crime. I had not
even infringed any rule of the Exchange, any more than had the ‘System’
when they performed their trick. Since my experimental panic I have
repeatedly put the trick in operation, and each time I have taken millions,
until to-day I have in my control, as absolutely as though I had honestly
earned them, as the labourer 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
their lives a million people.
“What do you intelligent men think of this situation? You know, because
you know the stock-gambling game, that the American people, with their
boasted brains and courage, come year after year with their bags of gold,
the result of their prosperous labours, and dump them, hundreds of millions,
into this gambling-inferno of yours. You know that they are fools, these
silly millions of people whom you term lambs and suckers. You chuckle as,
year after year, having been sent away shorn, they return for new shearing.
You marvel that the merchants, manufacturers, miners, lawyers, farmers,
who have sufficient intelligence to gather such surplus legitimately, would
bring it to our gambling-hell, where upon all sides is plain proof that we
who conduct the gambling, and who produce nothing, are obliged to take
from those who do produce, hundreds of millions each year for expenses,
and hundreds of millions each year for profits—for you know that we have
nothing to give them in return for what they bring to us. You know that
every dollar of the billions lost in Wall Street means higher prices for steel

rails, for lumber and cars, and that this means higher passenger and freight
rates to the people. You know that when the manufacturer brings his wealth
to Wall Street and is robbed of it, he will add something to the price of
boots and shoes, cotton and woollen clothes, and other necessities that he
makes and that he sells to the people. You know that when the copper, lead,
tin, and iron miners part with their surplus to the ‘System,’ it means higher
prices to the people for their copper pots and gutters, for the water that
comes through lead pipes, for their tin dippers and wash boilers, and for
their rents, and all those necessities into which machinery, lumber, and
other raw and finished material enters. You know that every hundred
millions dropped by real producers to the brigands of our world means
lower wages or less of the necessities and luxuries for all the people, and
especially for the farmer. You know that it is habit with us of Wall Street to
gloat over the doctrine of the ‘System,’ which the people parrot among
themselves, the doctrine that the people at large are not affected by our
gambling, because they, the people, having no surplus to gamble with,
never come into Wall Street. And yet, knowing all this, you never thought,
with all your wisdom and cynicism, that right here in this institution, which
you own and control, was the open sesame, for each or all of you, to those
great chests of gold that your clients, the ‘System,’ have filled to bursting
from the stores of the people. What, I ask, do you wise men think of the
situation as you now see it?”
There was an oppressive stillness on the floor. The great crowd, which
now contained nearly all the members of the Exchange, listened with
bulging eyes and open mouths to the revelations of their fellow member.
From time to 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 of impatience, for few in that dense throng outside could
understand the silence of the gigantic human crusher, which between the
hours of ten and three was never before known to miss a revolution except
while its victims’ hearts and souls were being removed from its gears and
meshes.
Bob Brownley paused and looked down into the faces of the breathless
gamblers with a contempt that was superb. He went on:
“Men of Wall Street, it is writ in the books of the ancients that every evil
contains within itself a cure or a destroyer. I do not pretend that what I am

revealing to you is to you a cure for this hideous evil, but I do say that what
I am giving you is a destroyer for it, and that while it will be to the world a
cure, it may leave you in a more fiery hell than the one of which you now
feel the flames. I do not care if it does. When I am through, any member of
the New York Stock Exchange who feels the iron in his soul can get instant
revenge and unlimited wealth. You who are turning over in your minds the
consideration that your great body can make new rules to render my
discovery inoperative, are dealing with a shadow. There is no rule or device
that can prevent its working. There are one thousand 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 that this Exchange deals in between one
and three million shares a day. Were any attempt made to prevent the
operation of my invention, transactions would because of such attempt drop
to five or ten thousand shares per day, or to such transactions as represent
stock that will be actually delivered and actually paid for. To make my
invention useless it must be made impossible to buy or sell the same share
of stock more than once at one session, and short selling, which is now, as
you know, the foundation of the modern stock-gambling structure, must
likewise be made impossible. If this could be done the $95,000,000 worth
of seats in the Exchange would be worth less than five millions, and, what
is of far greater import to all the people, the financial world would be
revolutionised. Men of Wall Street, do not fool yourselves. My invention is
a sure destroyer of the greatest curse in the world, stock-gambling.”
A sullen growl rose from the gamblers. Robert Brownley glared down his
defiance.
“Let me show you the impossibility of preventing in the future anyone’s
doing 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, or nerve
without desperation. It is well known to you that there are at all times
Exchange members who will commit any crime, barring perhaps murder, to
gain millions. Your members have from time to time shown nerve or
desperation enough to embezzle, raise certificates, give bogus checks,
counterfeit stocks and bonds, and this for gain of less than millions, and
when detection was probable. All these are criminal offences and their
detection is sure to bring disgrace and State prison. Yet members of this
Exchange desperate enough to take the chance, when confronted with loss
of fortune and open bankruptcy, have always been found with nerve enough

to attempt the crimes. I repeat that there are at all times Exchange members
who will commit any crime, barring perhaps murder, to gain millions. That
you may see that my successors will surely come from your midst from
time to time during the future existence of the Exchange, I will enumerate
the different classes of members who will follow in my footsteps:
“First, the ‘In Gold We Trust’ schemer who is of the ‘System’ type, but
who is outside the magic circle. A man of this class will reason: I know
scores of men, who stand high on ‘the Street’ and in the social world, who
have tens of millions that they have filched by ‘System’ tricks, if not by
legal crimes. If I perform this trick of Brownley’s, the trick of selling short
until a panic is produced, I shall make millions and none will be the wiser.
For all I know, many of the multi-millionaires whom I have seen produce
panics and who were applauded by ‘the Street’ and the press for their ability
and daring, and whose standing, business and social, is now the highest,
were only doing this same thing, and having been successful, they have
never been detected or suspected. But even suppose I fail, which can only
be through some extraordinary accident happening while I am engaged in
selling, I shall have committed no crime, and, in fact, shall have done no
one any great moral wrong, for if I fail to carry out my contract 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 what they bought; in fact they
will stand just where they stood before I attempted to bring on a panic.
“Second, if an Exchange member for any reason should find himself
overboard and should realise that he must publicly become bankrupt and
lose 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 his failure,
and when if by accident he should fail in his attempt to produce a panic, the
penalty would simply be his bankruptcy, which would have taken place in
any event.
“The third class is that large one that always will exist while there is
stock-gambling, a class of honest, square-dealing-play-the-game-fair-
Exchange men who would take no unfair advantage of their fellow-
members until they become awakened to the knowledge that they are about
to be ruined by their fellow-members’ trickery.
“Next, let us consider further whether it is possible for our Exchange to
prevent my device from being worked, now that it is known to all. Suppose

the Governing Committee was informed in advance that the attempt to work
the trick was to be made. If, at any session, after gong-strike, the Governing
Committee, or any Exchange authority, could for any reason compel a
member to cease operating, even for the purpose of showing that his
transactions were legitimate, the entire structure of stock-gambling would
fall. Think it through: Suppose a man like Barry Conant or myself, or any
active commission broker, begins the execution of a large order for a client,
one, say, who has advance information of a receivership, a fire at a mine,
the death of a President, a declaration of war, or any of the hundred 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 its clients. If the Governing
Committee could thus call the broker to account, the professional bear or
the schemer, who desired to prevent him from selling, would have but to
pass the word to the president of the Exchange that the broker in question
was about to work Brownley’s discovery and he could be taken from the
crowd and before he returned his place could be taken by others and he
could be ruined.
“Men of Wall Street, it is impossible to prevent the repetition of those
acts 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, stock speculation
will be dead. When stock speculation is dead, the people can no longer be
robbed by the ‘System.’ In leaving you, the Exchange, and stock-gambling
forever, as I shall when I leave this platform, I will say from the depth of a
heart that has been broken, from the profoundity of a soul that has been
withered by the ‘System’s’ poison, with a full sense of my responsibility to
my fellow-man and to my God, that I advise every one of you to do what I
have done and to do it quickly, before the doing of it by others shall have
made it impossible, before the doing of it by others shall have blown up the
whole stock-gambling structure. In accepting my advice you can quiet your
conscience, those of you who have any, 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 who took them from others, and who would take mine.
The more I and others take, the sooner will come the day when the stock-
gambling structure will fall.’
“The day on which the stock-gambling structure falls is the day for which
all honest men and women should pray.”

Bob Brownley paused and let his eyes sweep his dumfounded audience.
There was not a murmur. The crowd was speechless.
Again his eyes swept the room. Then he slowly raised his right hand with
fist clenched, as though about to deal a blow.
“Men of Wall Street”—his voice was now deep and solemn—“to show
that Robert Brownley knew what was fitting for the last day of his career,
he has revealed to you the trick—and more.
“Many of you are desperate. Many of you by to-morrow will be ruined.
The time of all times for such to put my trick in practice is now. The victim
of 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 the leading stocks
and to pay for them, even though after I have bought they fall a hundred
dollars a share. Here is your chance to prevent your ruin, your chance to
retrieve your fortune, your chance to secure revenge upon me, the one who
has robbed you.”
He paused only long enough for his astounding advice to connect with
his listener’s now keenly sensitive nerve centres; then deep and clear rang
out, “Barry Conant.” The wiry form of Bob’s old antagonist leaped to the
rostrum.
“I authorise you to buy any part of ten million shares of the leading
stocks at any price up to fifty points above the present market. There is my
check-book signed in blank, and I authorise you to use it up to a billion
dollars, and I agree to have in bank to-morrow sufficient funds to meet 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 the indebtedness of
Barry Conant and his house. Therefore he is now in good standing.” Bob
had kept his eye on the great clock; as the last word passed his lips, the
President’s gavel descended.
With a mighty rush the gamblers leaped for the different poles. Barry
Conant with lightning rapidity gave his orders to twenty of his assistants,
who, when Bob Brownley called for Conant, had gathered around their
chief. In less than a minute the dollar-battle of the age was on, a battle such
as no man had ever seen before. It required no supernatural wisdom for any
man on the floor to see that Bob Brownley’s seed had fallen in superheated
soil, that his until now secret hellite was about to be tested. It needed no
expert in the mystic art of deciphering the wall hieroglyphics 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 human heart and soul beats to detect
the approaching sound of onrushing doom to the stock-gambling structure.
The deafening roar of the brokers that had broken the stillness following
Robert Brownley’s fateful speech had awakened echoes that threatened to
shake down the Exchange walls. The surging mob on the outside was
roaring like a million hungry lions in an Arbestan run at slaughter time.

Chapter X.

The instant after the gong sounded Bob Brownley was alone on the floor
at the foot of the president’s desk. His form was swaying like a reed on the
edge of the cyclone’s path. I jumped to his side. His brother, who had
during Bob’s harangue been vainly endeavouring to beat his way through
the crowd, was there first. “For God’s sake, Bob, hear me. Word came from
your house 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 bull
that sees the arena walls go down, Bob rushed out through the nearest door,
which, I thanked God, was a side one leading to the street where the crowd
was thinnest. He cast a wild look around. His eyes lighted on an empty
automobile whose chauffeur had deserted to the crowd. It was the work 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 a bound the great
machine leaped through the crowd.
“In the name of Christ, Bob, be careful,” I yelled, as he hurled the iron
monster through the throng, scattering it to the right and left as the mower
scatters the sheaves in the wheat fields. Some were crushed beneath its
wheels. Bob Brownley heard not their screams, heard not the curses of
those who escaped. He was on his feet, his body crouched low over the
steering-wheel, which he grasped in his vise-like hands. His hatless head
was thrust far out, as though it strove to get to Beulah Sands ahead of his
body. His teeth were set, and as I had jumped into the machine I had noted
that his eyes were those of a maniac, who saw sanity just ahead if he could
but get to it in time. His ears were deaf not only to the howl of the terrified
throng and the curses of the teamsters who frantically pulled their horses to
the curb, but to my warnings as well. He swung the machine around the
corner at New Street and into Wall as though it had been the broadest
boulevard in the park. He took Wall Street at a bound I was sure would land

us through the fence into Trinity’s churchyard. But no. Again he turned the
corner, throwing the Juggernaut on its outside wheels from Wall Street into
Broadway as the crowds on the sidewalk held their breath in horror. I, too,
was on my feet, but crouching as I hung to the sides. Thank God, that
usually crowded thoroughfare was free from vehicles as far up as I could
see, on beyond the Astor House. What could it mean? Was that divinity
which ’tis said protects the drunkard and the idiot about to aid the mad rush
of this love-frenzied creature to his long-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 plunging automobiles filled with men. ’Twas from
them the gong clamour sounded. As we drew nearer. I saw that these were
the cars of the fire chiefs answering a call. I thanked God again and again as
I yelled into Bob’s ear, “For Beulah’s sake, Bob, don’t pass; if you do, we’ll
run into a blockade. If we keep in the rear they’ll clear our way, and we may
get to her alive.” I do not know whether he heard, but he held the machine
in the rear of the other cars and did not try to pass. Away we went on our
mad rush through crowded Broadway. At Union Square we lost our way-
clearers. As our automobile jumped across Fourteenth Street into Fourth
Avenue, Bob must have opened her up to the last notch, for she seemed to
leap through the air. We sent two wagons crashing across the sidewalks into
the buildings. Cries of rage arose above the din of the machine, and seemed
to follow in our wake. Bob was dead to all we passed. His entire being
seemed set on what was ahead. I knew he was an expert in the handling of
the automobile, for since his misfortune, automobiling with Beulah Sands
had been his favourite pastime, but who could expect to carry that plunging,
swaying car to Forty-second Street! Bob seemed to be performing the
wondrous task. We shot from curb to curb and around and in front of
vehicles and foot passengers as though the driver’s eyes and hands were
inspired.
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 he got
to Forty-second Street and try to make Fifth Avenue along that congested
block with its crush of Grand Central passengers and lines upon lines of
hacks and teams? No. His head must be clear. Again he threw the great
machine around the corner and into Fortieth Street. For a part of the block
our wheels rode the sidewalk, and I awaited the crash. It did not 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-car during the
last five years, carry him safely through what looked a dozen sure deaths?
Without slacking speed a jot we swung around the corner of Fortieth into
Fifth Avenue. The road was clear to Forty-second; there a dense jam of cars,
teams, and carriages blocked the crossing. Bob must have seen the solid
wall for I heard his low muttered curse. Nothing else to indicate that we
were blocked with his goal in sight. He never touched the speed controller,
but took the two blocks as though shot from a catapult. The two? No, one,
and three-quarters of the next, for when within a score of yards of the black
wall he jammed down the brakes, and the 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 car and a dray. It had not stopped when Bob
was off and up the avenue like a hound on the end-in-sight trail. I was after
him while the astonished bystanders stared in wonder. As we neared Bob’s
house I could see people on the stoop. I heard Bob’s secretary shout,
“Thank God, Mr. Brownley, you have 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 comes that I should like to see him.’ Then she ordered
me to get the afternoon paper. I handed it to her an hour ago. I think she
believes herself in her old office. I shut off the floor as you instructed. I did
not dare go to her for fear she would ask questions. I have”—but Bob was
up the stairs two and three steps at a time.
My breath was almost gone and it took me minutes to get to the second
floor. My feet touched the top stair, when, O God! that sound! For five long
years I had been trying to get it out of my ears, but now more guttural, more
agonised than before, it broke upon my tortured senses. I did not need to
seek its direction. With a bound I was at the threshold of Beulah Sands-
Brownley’s office. In that brief time the groans had stilled. For one instant I
closed my eyes, for the very atmosphere of that hall moaned and groaned
death. I opened them. Yes, I knew it. There at the desk was the beautiful
gray-clad figure of five years ago. There the two arms resting on the desk.
There the two beautiful hands holding the open paper, but the eyes, those
marvellous gray-blue doors to an immortal soul—they were closed forever.
The exquisitely beautiful face was cold and white and peaceful. Beulah
Sands was dead. The hell-hounds of the “System” had overtaken its maimed
and hunted victim; it had added her beautiful heart to the bags and barrels
and hogsheads stored away in its big “business-is-business” safe-deposit

vaults. My eyes in sick pity sought the form of my old schoolmate, my
college chum, my partner, my friend, the man I loved. He was on his knees.
His agonised face was turned to his wife. His clasped hands had been raised
in an awful, heart-crushing prayer as his Maker touched the bell. Bob
Brownley’s great brown eyes were closed, his clasped hands had dropped
against his wife’s head, and in dropping had unloosed the glorious golden-
brown waves until in fond abandon they had coiled around his arms and
brow as though she for whom he had sacrificed all was shielding his
beloved head from the chills and dark 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 his side. As I touched his now fast-icing brow my
eyes fell upon the great black headlines spread across the top of the paper
that Beulah Sands had been 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 the author
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 extreme gratification with the announcement that you
will add fiction to your distinguished literary achievements.
Your gifts as a writer are so wonderful and fascinating that I
look forward eagerly to your work in this new field—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 begin to see daylight in spots, where it looks
like a remedy and a real one. I can’t see how you will work
it; but I think I do get a hint, and it holds me tightly.
That story ought to be issued in a cheap (25¢) edition in
paper, and every man in American ought to read it. The third
part is yet to come; but, if I mistake not, it will make us all
say “Hurrah!” In this form the facts 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 the 13th.” It is one of the greatest stories I ever read.
Your previous articles are good, but this is a wonder. I
believe you are sincere and cannot help admiring your
wonderful courage + grit in going up against big odds. I
have no axe to grind with you, simply think that no matter
how big you may be you like to know that what you write is
appreciated by the majority of good american citizens. So
Here’s to you Mr Lawson + I back you to eventually win.
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.
Impossible to 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
the 13th.”
I was so interested, aroused and stirred, I felt I must
express to you some 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 and able willing to do better
for the oppressed.
Would it be an intrusion to extend sympathy to one bereft
of the beautiful gift of loving companionship? I hope that it
is sincerely felt.

Many admire and rejoice in your work—may it go
forward bringing the knowledge 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” is going to take to your latest writing “fiction” and
how are you to know unless your unknown friends write
you?
I have read every thing you have ever written because I
believe in you and admire the work you have done and are
doing and allow me to say that I finaly believe that you will
one day be recognized as one of the greatest story writers 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 the
13th”, but did not know your address. “Everybody’s”
contains some letters written you to Boston so hope this may
reach its destination.
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. Friday the 13th made an impression
on me which I could not easily shake off if I would. I was so
sorry it ended where it did that I wanted to cry out + could
hardly wait for the Jan. number. Yesterday I bought one in
Hanford Cal. rode 30 miles north to get it. I live a mile from
the recently filled in basin of old Tulare 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 really feel what
you write 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 certianly the idol of the
American people. I’ve heard you discussed by rich + poor,
monopolist + antimonopolist during the publication of
“Frenzied Finance” + the worst a monopolist could say was
that you were as bad as the Standard Oil, but wanted to get
even. “What is that but a virtue,” exclaimed I. “Couldn’t he
have made millions by staying in, but he recognized his past
failings and exposed them S.O. to uphold a nation. May
honor attend him. Isn’t that being a man and a gentleman?”
People read “Frenzied Finance” to a man + would loan
the magazine one to another so those who felt the 15¢

impossible could get the good 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 the past; 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 somewhat familiar with amalgamated
copper, etc. I want to say I have followed your writings with
lively interest and have sworn by all the statements you have
made. It is, therefore, with the greatest regret that I am
compelled to state that my faith in you has been shattered.
When you state in your story of “Friday the 13th” that the
heroine walked in to an office in New York in the middle of
July with a feather turban on her head I simply cannot
swallow it. That a lady of refinement and good 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 to the breaking point.

However, be that as it may, I want to say that you have made
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 a superior woman who called my attention to the
turban when I was reading your story 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 first installment to “Friday the 13th,” as have also your
previous writings, from which I learned a great deal,—
although from a financial standpoint, following what I
thought to be your advice, I am several thousand dollars
looser,—and I take this means of contributing my mite of
encouragement, firmly believing that your work is doing a
great good, and trusting 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 hope you will not consider me
presuming if I take a moment of your valuable time to thank
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
information and 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 to back up the crow with.” You certainly are a game and
competant old fighter.

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’s Magazine this month. It is the beat story I ever
read and the best I ever saw published in any magazine.
I am well posted on the “Brokers” business and enjoyed
your story very much. I hope you will continue to write
them. I know they are taken more from real life than
immagination. I am sure they will be appreciated as much as
“Frenzied Finance”. I have taken the liberty to send a good
word to 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’s
Everybody’s. Being an old trader myself, I have appreciated
every word of it and look forward for the continuation with
much interest.
I just want to say this too—that anyone who says that you
cannot write anything else but “Street” gossip had better
cover his “shorts”.

Wishing you all kinds of success, and with
congratulations on your splendid work, 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 first installment of your excellent story “Friday the
13th”. It is so far a 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) you are “It” when it comes to writting fiction

as well as tricking the Insurance 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
first installment of your story in the December number, and I
must say that I am more than pleased with it. As a writer of
fiction you are sure to make another big hit.

Yours truly,
W. I. White.

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