with inside information?

He did not as yet answer these questions in the affirmative; to do so
meant a decision subversive of all his newly acquired sense of success.
But though he still denied the accusations, they would not be thus
answered, constantly returning.

At the offices it was as though the dead man were lying in wait. A sense
of fright possessed him with the opening of the door. The girl at the
telephone greeted him with swollen eyes, swollen with hysterical
weeping; the stenographers moved noiselessly, hushed by the indefinable
sense of the supernatural. The brass plate on the door--W. O.
Forshay--seemed to him something inexpressibly grim and horrible. He had
the feeling which the others showed in their roving glances, as though
that plate hid something, as though there was something behind his door,
waiting.

He went into the inner offices, at a sudden summons. Hauk was at the
table, gazing out of the window; Flaspoller worrying and fussing in the
center of the rug, switching aimlessly back and forth.

Bojo nodded silently on entering.

"You saw?" said Hauk with a jerk of his head.

"Yes. Horrible!"

Flaspoller broke out: "Not a cent in the world. God knows how much the
firm will have to make good. Thirty-five, forty, forty-five thousand,
maybe more. Oh, we're stuck all right."

"Do you mean to say," said Bojo slowly, "that he left nothing--no
property?"

"Oh, a house perhaps--mortgaged, of course; and then do we know what
else he owes? No. A hell of a hole we've got in with your Pittsburgh &
New Orleans."

"That's not quite fair," said Bojo quietly. "I did give you a tip on
Indiana Smelter and you made money on that. I never said anything about
Pittsburgh & New Orleans. I distinctly refused to. You drew your own
conclusions."

"That's a good joke," said Flaspoller with a contemptuous laugh.

"What do you mean?" said Bojo, flushing angrily.

"Well, I'll tell you what I mean," said Flaspoller, discretion to the
winds. "When you come into a firm that has treated you generously as we
have, put up your salary without waiting to be asked, and you bring in
orders, confidential orders, to sell five hundred shares to-day, a
thousand to-morrow, like you sell yourself, and your friends sell
too--if you let your firm go on selling and don't know what's up, you're
either one big jackass or a--"

"Or a what?" said Bojo, advancing.

Something in the menacing eye caused the little broker to halt ab