te of the
Erie Auriferous. And the directors and chief shareholders were busily
performing the interesting process called unloading. Nor did ever a
farmer of Cahoga County in haying time with a thunderstorm threatening,
unload with greater rapidity than did the major shareholders of the
Auriferous. Mr. Lucullus Fyshe traded off a quarter of his stock to an
unwary member of the Mausoleum Club at a drop of thirty per cent, and
being too prudent to hold the rest on any terms, he conveyed it at once
as a benefaction in trust to the Plutorian Orphans' and Foundlings'
Home; while the purchaser of Mr. Fyshe's stock, learning too late of
his folly, rushed for his lawyers to have the shares conveyed as a gift
to the Home for Incurables.

Mr. Asmodeus Boulder transferred his entire holdings to the Imbeciles'
Relief Society, and Mr. Furlong, senior, passed his over to a Chinese
mission as fast as pen could traverse paper.

Down at the office of Skinyer and Beatem, the lawyers of the company,
they were working overtime drawing up deeds and conveyances and trusts
in perpetuity, with hardly time to put them into typewriting. Within
twenty-four hours the entire stock of the company bid fair to be in the
hands of Idiots, Orphans, Protestants, Foundlings, Imbeciles,
Missionaries, Chinese, and other unfinancial people, with Tomlinson the
Wizard of Finance as the senior shareholder and majority control. And
whether the gentle Wizard, as he sat with mother planning his vast
benefaction to Plutoria University, would have felt more at home with
his new group of fellow-shareholders than his old, it were hard to say.

But, meantime, at the office of Skinyer and Beatem all was activity.
For not only were they drafting the conveyances of the perpetual trusts
as fast as legal brains working overtime could do it, but in another
part of the office a section of the firm were busily making their
preparations against the expected actions for fraud and warrants of
distraint and injunctions against disposal of assets and the whole
battery of artillery which might open on them at any moment. And they
worked like a corps of military engineers fortifying an escarpment,
with the joy of battle in their faces.

The storm might break at any moment. Already at the office of the
_Financial Undertone_ the type was set for a special extra with a
heading three inches high:

COLLAPSE
OF THE ERIE CONSOLIDATED
ARREST OF THE MAN TOMLINSON