nd fell dead upon the broad steps among the raving crowd of
Jews, a phial crushed in his hand. In Frankfort one leapt from the
Cathedral top, leaving a redder stain where he struck the red tower. Men
stabbed and shot and strangled themselves, drank death or breathed it
as the air, because in a lonely corner of England the life had departed
from one cold heart vowed to the service of greed.

The blow could not have fallen at a more disastrous moment. It came when
Wall Street was in a condition of suppressed 'scare'-suppressed, because
for a week past the great interests known to act with or to be actually
controlled by the Colossus had been desperately combating the effects of
the sudden arrest of Lucas Hahn, and the exposure of his plundering of
the Hahn banks. This bombshell, in its turn, had fallen at a time when
the market had been 'boosted' beyond its real strength. In the language
of the place, a slump was due. Reports from the corn-lands had not been
good, and there had been two or three railway statements which had been
expected to be much better than they were. But at whatever point in the
vast area of speculation the shudder of the threatened break had been
felt, 'the Manderson crowd' had stepped in and held the market up.
All through the week the speculator's mind, as shallow as it is
quick-witted, as sentimental as greedy, had seen in this the hand of
the giant stretched out in protection from afar. Manderson, said the
newspapers in chorus, was in hourly communication with his lieutenants
in the Street. One journal was able to give in round figures the sum
spent on cabling between New York and Marlstone in the past twenty-four
hours; it told how a small staff of expert operators had been sent down
by the Post Office authorities to Marlstone to deal with the flood of
messages. Another revealed that Manderson, on the first news of the
Hahn crash, had arranged to abandon his holiday and return home by the
Lusitania; but that he soon had the situation so well in hand that he
had determined to remain where he was.

All this was falsehood, more or less consciously elaborated by the
'finance editors', consciously initiated and encouraged by the shrewd
business men of the Manderson group, who knew that nothing could better
help their plans than this illusion of hero-worship--knew also that
no word had come from Manderson in answer to their messages, and that
Howard B. Jeffrey, of Steel and Iron fame, was the true org