of discipline there
seemed to intervene unreal worlds.

The group gathered in the hotel branch of Pitt & Sanderson were
indolently interested rather than excited. They were of the flitting and
superficial gambling type, youngsters still new to the excitement of the
game and old men who could not tear themselves away from their
established habit. They formed quite a little coterie in which the
differences of age and wealth were obliterated by the common bond of
the daily hazard. He knew the type well, the reckless plunger risking
thousands on shallow margins, determined to make or lose all at one
killing; the rodent, sharp-eyed, close-fisted veteran, wary from many
failures, who was content to play for half a point rise and take his
instant profit. The lounging group studied him with a moment's
curiosity, seeking in which category to place the intruder, whether
among the shifting truant crowd stopping for the moment's information or
among that harried occasional group of lost souls who came expectant of
nothing but complete disaster.

Bojo went to the tape with almost the feeling with which a reformed
drunkard closes his hand over the glass that had once been his
destruction. His mind, excited by the memories of the night before, was
prepared for a shock. To his surprise the clicking procession of
values--Reading, Union Pacific, Amalgamated Copper, Northern
Pacific--showed but fractional declines. The break he had come to
witness did not develop. He waited a quarter of an hour, half an hour,
an hour. The market continued weak but heavy.

"Nothing much doing," he said, turning to his neighbor, a financial rail
bird of a rather horsy type, grisled and bald.

"Playing it short?"

"Haven't yet made up my mind. What do you think?" he said, to draw the
other on.

"Think?" said the other with the enthusiasm of the gambler's conviction.
"Lord, there's only one thing to think. This market's touched bottom
two weeks ago. When it starts to rise watch things go kiting."

"You think so?" said Bojo, with the instinctive tendency to seek hope in
the slightest straws that is the strangest part of all the strange
acquaintanceships of the moment which speculation engenders. He had to
listen for five minutes to impassioned oratory, to hearing all the
reasons recounted why the long depression was nothing but psychological
and an upward turn a certainty. He slipped away presently, rather
relieved at this confidence from a shallow pr