ed and old, stiffened visibly. He turned his eyes on Bulger.

"Forget that, too," he said. "Some day, when I'm strong enough, you'll
go with me and you'll believe too." And now the secretary had signalled
the chauffeur, and Norcross had risen to go.

* * * * *

The streams of destiny were converging that afternoon; the lines were
drawing close together. Among the towers of Lower Manhattan, Norcross
sat baring his soul; on a bench in Stuyvesant Square, Rosalie Le Grange
had reported the consummation of her investigations to Dr. Walter
Huntington Blake; in a back parlor of the Upper West Side, Paula
Markham, with many a sidelong glance at the approaches, sat memorizing
the last syllable of a set of notes on yellow legal cap paper. But the
master current was flowing elsewhere. In the offices of the _Evening
Sun_, the stereotypers had just shot the front page of the Wall Street
edition down to the clanking basement. It carried a "beat"; and that
item of news had as much to do with this story as with the ultimate
destinies of the L.D. and M. railroad. On October 19, two weeks hence,
the directors of the road were to meet and decide whether to pay or
pass the dividend. "The directors"--that, as the _Sun_ insinuated,
meant none other than Norcross. Holding a majority of the L.D. and M.
stock, holding the will of those directors, his creatures, he alone
would decide whether to declare the dividend or to pass it. The stock
wavered at about fifty, waiting the decision. If Norcross put it on a
dividend-paying basis, it was good for eighty. To know which way he
would decide, to extract any information from that inscrutable
mind--that were to open a steel vault with a pen-knife. "All trading,"
the _Sun_ assured its readers, "will be speculative; it is considered a
pure gamble."

As Bulger parted with Norcross on the street and turned south, a
newsboy thrust the Wall Street _Sun_ into his face. The announcement of
the L.D. and M. situation jumped out at him from a headline. The inside
information, held for two weeks by the group of speculators in which
Bulger moved, was out; the public was admitted to the transaction; now
was the time, if ever, to strike. He found a sound-proof telephone, and
did a few minutes of rapid talking. Then he proceeded to his office.

The force was gone. Alone at his desk, he went over the papers in a
complicated calculation which he had made twenty times before. By all
d