n, and get it," he said. "We take your word."

On the pavement the crowd had thickened, and when it caught sight of me,
a confused murmur rose, and I was surrounded by half-hysterical women.
The trouble, as Bingley had said, had begun with the small depositors;
and in the line that pressed now like black ants to the doors, there
were many evidently who had entrusted their nest-eggs to us for
safe-keeping. I was not gentle by nature, and the sight of a woman's
tears always aroused in me, not the angel, but the brute. For five years
I had been married to a descendant of the Blands and the Fairfaxes, and
yet, as I stood there, held at bay, in the midst of those sobbing women,
the veneer of refinement peeled off from me, and the raw strength of the
common man showed on the surface, and triumphed again as it had
triumphed over the frightened directors in my office.

"What are you whining about?" I said with a laugh, "your money is all
there. Go in and get it."

An old woman in a plaid shawl, with her mouth twisted sideways by a
recent stroke of paralysis, barred my way with an outstretched hand, in
which she held the foot of a grey yarn stocking.

"I'd laid it up for my old age, Mister," she mumbled, through her
toothless gums, "an' they told me it was safer in the bank, so I put it
there. But I reckon I'd feel easier if I had it back--I reckon I'd feel
easier."

"Then go after it," I replied harshly, pushing her out of my way. "If
you don't get it before I come back, I'll give it to you with my own
hands."

For a minute my presence subdued the crowd; but the panic terror had
gripped it, and while I crossed the street the hysterical murmurs were
in my ears. A desire to turn and throttle the sound as I might a howling
wild beast took possession of me. It was true, I suppose, as Dr.
Theophilus had once told me, that the quality I lacked was tenderness.

The General fortunately was alone in his private office, and when I went
in he glanced up enquiringly from a railroad report he was reading.

"It's you, Ben, is it?" he remarked, and went back to his paper.

"General," I said bluntly, and stopped short in the centre of the room,
"I want a quarter of a million dollars in cash by nine o'clock to-morrow
morning."

For a moment he sat speechless, blinking at me with his swollen eyelids,
while his lower lip protruded angrily, like the lip of a crying child.
Then the old war-horse in him responded gallantly to the scent of