.

"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, absol