tes, and to furnish a
working capital for the ensuing year. These things he knew in the
strange concrete arithmetical manner of the routine bookkeeper. Other
men saw a desperate phase of firm rivalry; he saw a struggle to the
uttermost. Other men cheered a rescue: he thrilled over the magnificent
gesture of the Gambler scattering his stake in largesse to Death.

It was the simple turning of the hand from full breathed prosperity to
lifeless failure.

His view was the inverse of his master's. To Thorpe it had suddenly
become a very little thing in contrast to the great, sweet elemental
truth that the dream girl had enunciated. To Collins the affair was
miles vaster than the widest scope of his own narrow life.

The firm could not take up its notes when they came due; it could not
pay the interest on the mortgages, which would now be foreclosed; it
could not even pay in full the men who had worked for it--that would
come under a court's adjudication.

He had therefore watched Thorpe's desperate sally to mend the weakened
chain, in all the suspense of a man whose entire universe is in the
keeping of the chance moment. It must be remembered that at bottom,
below the outer consciousness, Thorpe's final decision had already
grown to maturity. On the other hand, no other thought than that of
accomplishment had even entered the little bookkeeper's head. The rescue
and all that it had meant had hit him like a stroke of apoplexy, and
his thin emotions had curdled to hysteria. Full of the idea he appeared
before the men.

With rapid, almost incoherent speech he poured it out to them.
Professional caution and secrecy were forgotten. Wallace Carpenter
attempted to push through the ring for the purpose of stopping him. A
gigantic riverman kindly but firmly held him back.

"I guess it's just as well we hears this," said the latter.

It all came out--the loan to Carpenter, with a hint at the motive: the
machinations of the rival firm on the Board of Trade; the notes, the
mortgages, the necessity of a big season's cut; the reasons the rival
firm had for wishing to prevent that cut from arriving at the market;
the desperate and varied means they had employed. The men listened
silent. Hamilton, his eyes glowing like coals, drank in every word. Here
was the master motive he had sought; here was the story great to his
hand!

"That's what we ought to get," cried Collins, almost weeping, "and now
we've gone and bust, just because th