modern exploitation of the world's four corners makes so
many "kings" that the name had not, as yet, familiarized itself to the
popular eye.

City men, who hear more than they read, knew in a general way about this
"Rubber King." He was an outsider who had come in, and was obviously
filling his pockets; but it was a comforting rule that outsiders who did
this always got their pockets emptied for them again in the long run.
There seemed nothing about Thorpe to suggest that he would prove an
exception to the rule. He was investing his winnings with great freedom,
so the City understood, and his office was besieged daily by promoters
and touts. They could clean out his strong-box faster than the profits
of his Rubber corner could fill it. To know such a man, however, could
not but be useful, and they made furtive notes of his number in Austin
Friars on their cuffs, after conversation had drifted from him to other
topics.

As to the Rubber corner itself, the Stock Exchange as a whole was
apathetic. When some of the sufferers ventured cautious hints about the
possibility of official intervention on their behalf, they were laughed
at by those who did not turn away in cold silence. Of the fourteen men
who had originally been caught in the net drawn tight by Thorpe and
Semple, all the conspicuous ones belonged to the class of "wreckers," a
class which does not endear itself to Capel Court.

Both Rostocker and Aronson, who, it was said, were worst hit, were men
of great wealth, but they had systematically amassed these fortunes by
strangling in their cradles weak enterprises, and by undermining and
toppling over other enterprises which would not have been weak if they
had been given a legitimate chance to live. Their system was legal
enough, in the eyes alike of the law and of the Stock Exchange rules.
They had an undoubted right to mark out their prey and pursue it, and
bring it down, and feed to the bone upon it. But the exercise of this
right did not make them beloved by the begetters and sponsors of their
victims. When word first went round, on the last day of February, that
a lamb had unexpectedly turned upon these two practised and confident
wolves, and had torn an ear from each of them, and driven them pell-mell
into a "corner," it was received on all sides with a gratified smile.

Later, by fortnightly stages, the story grew at once more tragic and
more satisfactory. Not only Rostocker and Aronson, but a dozen others