ublic
alarm, David Kent took up the last of his bank promises-to-pay, and
transferred his final mortgaged holding in Gaston realty. When it was done
he locked himself in his office in the Farquhar Building and balanced the
account. On leaving the New Hampshire country town to try the new cast for
fortune in the golden West, he had turned his small patrimony into
cash--some ten thousand dollars of it. To set over against the bill of
exchange for this amount, which he had brought to Gaston a year earlier,
there were a clean name, a few hundred dollars in bank, six lots, bought
and paid for, in one of the Gaston suburbs, and a vast deal of experience.

Kent ran his hands through his hair, opened the check-book and hastily
filled out a check payable to himself for the remaining few hundreds. When
he reached the Apache National on the corner of Colorado and Texas
Streets, he was the one hundred and twenty-seventh man in the queue, which
extended around the corner and doubled back and forth in the cross-street
to the stoppage of all traffic. The announcement in the _Clarion_ had done
its work, and the baleful flower of panic, which is a juggler's rose for
quick-growing possibilities, was filling the very air of the street with
its acrid perfume--the scent of all others that soonest drives men mad.

Major James Guilford, the president of the Apache National, was in the
cage with the sweating paying tellers, and it was to him that Kent
presented his check when his turn came.

"What! You, too, Kent?" said the president, reproachfully. "I thought you
had more backbone."

Kent shook his head.

"Gaston has absorbed nine-tenths of the money I brought here; I'll absorb
the remaining tenth myself, if it's just the same to you, Major. Thank
you." And the hundred and twenty-seventh man pocketed his salvage from the
wreck and fought his way out through the jam at the doors. Two hours
farther along in the forenoon the Apache National suspended payment, and
the bank examiner was wired for.

For suddenness and thoroughgoing completeness the Gaston bubble-bursting
was a record-breaker. For a week and a day there was a frantic struggle
for enlargement, and by the expiration of a fortnight the life was pretty
well trampled out of the civic corpse and the stench began to arise.

Flight upon any terms then became the order of the day, and if the place
had been suddenly plague-smitten the panicky exodus could scarcely have
been more headlo