?" he cried to the groom.

"Just about, sir."

"Jump in."

"I'm so frightened! Telephone at once!" He heard Doris cry, and, hardly
heeding her he looked about vacantly. Then something was pressed in his
hand, and Patsie's voice was sounding in his ears. "Here's your bag. I
packed it. Keep up your courage, Bojo!"

"Patsie, you're a dear. Thank you. All right now!" He took her hands,
met her clear brave eyes, and sprang into the sleigh. A terrible
sickening dread came over him, an unreasoning superstitious dread. He
felt ruin and worse, cold and damp in the air about him, ruin inevitable
from the first, the bubble's collapse as he waved a hasty farewell and
shot away in the race across the night.

CHAPTER XIV

THE CRASH

"What has happened?" he asked himself a hundred times during the
headlong drive. A corner in Pittsburgh & New Orleans--that was possible
but hardly probable. But if a corner had taken place it meant ruin,
absolute ruin--and worse. The thought was too appalling to be seized at
once. He reassured himself with specious explanations. There might be a
flurry; Gunther and his crowd, who were in control of the system, might
have attempted a division to support their property; but the final
attack at which Joseph Skelly had hinted more than once as timed for the
coming week, the throwing on the market of 100,000 shares--200,000 if
necessary--must overwhelm this support, must overwhelm it. What was
terrible, though, was the unknown--to be hours from New York, cut off
from communication, and not to know what was this shapeless dread.

When they swung into Jenkinstown, orange lights from the windows cut up
the snowbound streets in checkerboard patterns of light and shade: an
organ was beginning in mournful bass from a shanty church; a cheap
phonograph in a flickering ice-cream parlor was grinding out a ragged
march. Through the windows, heavy parties still at the Sunday newspapers
were gathered under swinging lamps. The cutter drew up by the hovel of
a station and departed, leaving him alone in the semi-darkness, a prey
to his thoughts. A group returning after a day's visit trudged past him,
laughing uproariously, Slavic and brutish in type, the women in imitated
finery, gazing at him in insolent curiosity. He began to walk to escape
the dismal sense of unlovely existence they brought him. Beyond were the
mathematical rows of barracks--other brutish lives, the bleak ice-cream
parlor, the melancholy