his panic--on others I shall
cause it. The alternative is for your decision."

Fairley and Henry drew a little closer together by common impulse as if
for alliance in danger. A long silence, freighted with tensity, followed
until Fairley inquired in a stunned voice: "Please explain."

With the crisp impersonality of a prosecutor Hamilton Burton talked. He
outlined his plans, gave a glimpse of his tremendous levers of power;
let them see what engines of destruction he controlled and finally made
his demand. When he was through neither of his visitors could doubt his
might or his intent. At the end he said:

"You hold among the securities of your two banks just the margin of Coal
and Ore which I need for complete safety. Turn your proxies over to me
tonight and tomorrow will pass quietly. I will support every market
depression caused by Malone's illness. There will be no panic. Fail to
do that and ten minutes after the gong sounds on the floor, I shall be
ripping the entrails out of the Street! Full-page advertisements in
every paper in town will feed the general uneasiness into an orgy of
terror. Frightened mobs will clamor about the doors of your banks. Other
things will happen which it is not now necessary to enumerate. It will
be the blackest day in Exchange history and one that will reflect
itself in all the bourses of Europe."

After eleven o'clock, when Mary Burton and Jefferson Edwardes returned
from the theater, the girl caught a glimpse of a strange picture as she
paused in the hall.

Six silent men stood or sat about the brightly lighted library with blue
wreaths of cigar smoke drifting upward above them. It was plain that
this silence had fallen upon them only as they heard the door slam, and
that, like their attitudes, it was strained and artificial.

Hamilton Burton stood before the hearth with his face set as unyielding
and immobile as chiseled granite. Ruferton eyed the two bankers with a
sidewise stare between drooping lids, and Hendricks, at the window,
presented to view only his back. But the features of the bankers
themselves were haggard and miserable; like the faces of men making a
last desperate stand, yet fronting inevitable defeat. Such faces one
might imagine in a nightmare, staring on a passerby and failing to see
him, from a rack of torture.

Mary Burton shuddered a little, though she did not know why, and the
lips of Jefferson Edwardes compressed themselves as he followed her to
the mu