the station.

CHAPTER XVI

THE week following the August Bank Holiday is very rarely indeed a busy
or anxious time in the City. In the ordinary course of things, it
serves as the easy-going prelude--with but casual and inattentive visits
eastward, and with only the most careless glances through the financial
papers--to the halcyon period of the real vacation. Men come to the City
during this week, it is true, but their thoughts are elsewhere--on the
moors, on the blue sea, on the glacier or the fiord, or the pleasant
German pine forests.

To the great mass of City people; this August in question began in a
normal enough fashion. To one little group of operators, however, and to
the widening circle of brokers, bankers, and other men of affairs whose
interests were more or less involved with those of this group, it was a
season of keen perturbation. A combat of an extraordinary character was
going on--a combat which threatened to develop into a massacre. Even
to the operators who, unhappily for themselves, were principals in this
fight, it was a struggle in the dark. They knew little about it, beyond
the grimly-patent fact that they were battling for their very lives.
The outer ring of their friends and supporters and dependents knew still
less, though their rage and fears were perhaps greater. The "press"
seemed to know nothing at all. This unnatural silence of the City's
mouthpieces, usually so resoundingly clamorous upon the one side and the
other when a duel is in progress, gave a sinister aspect to the thing.
The papers had been gagged and blindfolded for the occasion. This in
itself was of baleful significance. It was not a duel which they had
been bribed to ignore. It was an assassination.

Outwardly there was nothing to see, save the unofficial, bald statement
that on August 1st, the latest of twelve fortnightly settlements in this
stock, Rubber Consols had been bid for, and carried over, at 15 pounds
for one-pound shares. The information concerned the public at large not
at all. Nobody knew of any friend or neighbour who was fortunate enough
to possess some of these shares. Readers here and there, noting the
figures, must have said to themselves that certain lucky people were
coining money, but very little happened to be printed as to the identity
of these people. Stray notes were beginning to appear in the personal
columns of the afternoon papers about a "Rubber King" of the name of
Thorpe, but the