-stock which sold last week at 210!"

"Precisely. If I can get you a reinsurer on the terms I mentioned.
And I think you'll be getting out pretty well. You're impaired right
now, you know."

Mr. Murch's financial vanity was touched.

"After all," he said, with an effort, "I probably averaged only 150 for
mine. I've got pretty fair dividends on it for some time. That'll get
me out pretty nearly even. Well, Mr. Belknap, if you can arrange to
reinsure the Salamander on those terms, go ahead."

"The directors of the company--?" said Belknap, suggestively.

"I either own or control a majority of the stock," replied Mr. Murch.

There was no more to be said. The President and the majority
stockholder of a corporation whose days were numbered walked back to
the office with hardly a word spoken between them.

These were troublous times in William Street. The Salamander was not
the only company which had been hard hit in Boston. Many of the
smaller underwriting institutions were tottering very close to the
wall. Already two failures were known; a dozen others were suspected.
But in Boston, where the stricken city lay impatiently waiting, most of
the companies already had men on the ground, adjusting and paying
claims. The Boston insurance district had fortunately been left
untouched, so that the local records were intact, making the work of
the adjusters much simpler than it would otherwise have been.

Whence was the money to come--this golden flood which now began to pour
from a hundred coffers into the empty pockets of the sufferers? The
large companies, for the most part, were paying without discount or
delay, and the line of claimants at the Boston offices and adjustment
bureaus never ceased. In New York, in London, in Hartford, wherever
insurance companies had their home offices, securities were being
converted into cash to meet this tremendous demand. And the golden
stream that flowed toward Boston knew no stop.

Of all the companies doing a general business in the East, the Guardian
had come through least scathed, its withers unwrung. Thanks to the
raiding of its Boston business by the Salamander, the Guardian's loss,
which was confined wholly to three-year and five-year lines unexpired,
would not much exceed, according to Smith's computation, $100,000, even
if all its claims were adjusted as total.

Smith's first work on reaching the home office had been to compute the
actual liability of the Guar