om some unnamed frontier of a newer cow-country, saw what he
had missed, took to drink, and shot himself in the lobby of the
Mid-Continent Hotel, an ornate, five-storied, brick-and-terra-cotta
structure standing precisely upon the site of the "J-lazy-S" branding
corral.

It was in this same Year Two, the fame of the latest of western Meccas for
young men having penetrated to the provincial backgrounds of New
Hampshire, that David Kent came.

By virtue of his diploma, and three years of country practice in the New
Hampshire county town where his father before him had read Blackstone and
Chitty, he had his window on the fourth floor of the Farquhar Building
lettered "Attorney and Counselor at Law"; but up to the day in the latter
part of the fateful Year Three, when the overdue crash came, he was best
known as a reckless plunger in real estate--this, mind you, at a moment
when every third man counted his gains in "front feet", and was shouting
himself hoarse at the daily brass-band lot sales.

When the bottom fell out in the autumn of Year Three, Kent fell with it,
though not altogether as far or as hard as many another. One of his
professional hold-fasts--it was the one that afterward became the
bread-tackle in the famine time--was his position as local attorney for
the railway company. By reason of this he was among the first to have a
hint of the impending cataclysm. The Western Pacific, after so long a
pause on the banks of Dry Creek, had floated its second mortgage bonds and
would presently build on to the capital, leaving Gaston to way-station
quietude. Therefore and wherefore----

Kent was not lacking in native shrewdness or energy. He foresaw, not the
pitiable bubble-burst which ensued, indeed, but the certain and inevitable
end of the speculative era. Like every one else, he had bought chiefly
with promises to pay, and his paper in the three banks aggregated a sum
equal to a frugal New Hampshire competence.

"How long have I got?" was the laconic wire which he sent to Loring, the
secretary of the Western Pacific Advisory Board in Boston, from whom his
hint had come. And when Loring replied that the grading and track-laying
contracts were already awarded, there was at least one "long" on the
Gaston real estate exchange who wrought desperately night and day to
"unload".

As it turned out, the race against time was both a victory and a defeat.
On the morning when the _Daily Clarion_ sounded the first note of p