!" For an instant a baleful fire leaped into
Malone's face. "We will have tomorrow! Every sinew of American finance
shall be strained against him. But tomorrow may be too late. Can you
hold out?"

Edwardes smiled grimly. "I'm trying like all hell," he said. "I've not
laid down yet."

* * * * *

It was two o'clock and the Stock-Exchange was a shambles. Every security
in the Street was down to panic figures and plunging plummet-like to
further depths. At shortening intervals over the hoarse shrieks of the
floor's tumult boomed the brazen hammer blows of the huge gong, which
should sound only twice each day. At every recurring announcement of
failure a wall-shaking howl went up and echoed among the sixty-two
inverted golden blossoms of the ceiling.

The faces of the men to whom these cracked and hoarsened voices belonged
had become bestial and wolfish. Where the morning had seen well-groomed
representatives of Money's upper caste, the afternoon saw a seething
mass of human ragamuffins, torn of clothing, sweat-drenched and lost to
all senses save those twin emotions of ferocity and fear. Back and forth
they swirled and eddied, and howled like wild things about carrion. At
one side, panting, disheveled and bleeding from scratches incurred in
the melee, bulked the gigantic figure of Len Haswell. He had no need
now to bellow in a bull-like duel of voices and ferocity. The stampede
had been so well put into motion that the floor was doing for him his
deadly work of price-smashing. Telegraph wires were quivering from every
section of the United States to the tune of--"Sell--cut loose--throw
over!" A universal mania to get any price for anything was sweeping the
land like a conflagration. Tomorrow would bring those reflexes from
today when banks and trust companies from the Lakes to the Rio Grande
would topple in the wake of their metropolitan predecessors. Ruin sat
crowned and enthroned, monarch of the day and parent of a panic which
should close mills, and starve the poor and foster anarchy--but Hamilton
Burton's hand was nearer Edwardes' throat.

Staples and his twenty cooeperators fought on doggedly, grimly, to turn
the tide before the close, but the nation was mad, and the men who
fought and clamored here in this pit of its bowels were the most violent
maniacs.

And while these things went forward Mary Burton still sat alone in the
private office of Jefferson Edwardes, waiting. Through c