was like
a man who has been killed by lightning and lies dead with the look on his
face that he had just before the bolt struck him.

"Why didn't you tell me this," said I to Ball, "when I had you on the
'phone?" My tone was quiet enough, but the very question ought to have
shown him that my brain was like a schooner in a cyclone.

"We heard it just after you rang off," was his reply. "We've been trying
to get you ever since. I've gone everywhere after Textile stock. Very few
will sell, or even lend, and they ask--the best price was ten points above
to-day's closing. A strong tip's out that Textiles are to be rocketed."

Ten points up already--on the mere rumor! Already ten dollars to pay on
every share I was "short"--and I short more than two hundred thousand! I
felt the claws of the fiend Ruin sink into the flesh of my shoulders. "Ball
doesn't know how I'm fixed," I remember I thought, "and he mustn't know."

I lit a cigar with a steady hand and waited for Joe's next words.

"I went to see Jenkins at once," he went on. Jenkins was then first
vice-president of the Textile Trust. "He's all cut up because the news got
out--says Langdon and he were the only ones who knew, so he supposed--says
the announcement wasn't to have been made for a month--not till Langdon
returned. He has had to confirm it, though. That was the only way to free
his crowd from suspicion of intending to rig the market."

"All right," said I.

"Have you seen the afternoon paper?" he asked. As he held it out to me, my
eye caught big Textile head-lines, then flashed to some others--something
about my going to marry Miss Ellersly.

"All right," said I, and with the paper in my hand, went to my outside
office. I kept on toward my inner office, saying over my shoulder--to the
stenographer: "Don't let anybody interrupt me." Behind the closed and
locked door my body ventured to come to life again and my face to reflect
as much as it could of the chaos that was heaving in me like ten thousand
warring devils.

Three months before, in the same situation, my gambler's instinct would
probably have helped me out. For I had not been gambling in the great
American Monte Carlo all those years without getting used to the downs
as well as to the ups. I had not--and have not--anything of the business
man in my composition. To me, it was wholly finance, wholly a game, with
excitement the chief factor and the sure winning, whether the little ball
rolled my way