g for him. Oh, he won't hear
us--talk all you like."

"How hard is he hit?" said Bojo anxiously.

Marsh shrugged his shoulder and swore.

"How hard, Granning?"

"Twenty thousand or more," said Granning gravely, "and there are some
bad sides to it." He shook his head, glanced at DeLancy, and added:
"Then there's the girl."

"Louise Varney?"

"The same--mother has been camping on the telephone all day. Not a very
calm person, mother--ugh--nasty business!"

"Rotten business," said Bojo, remorsefully. He went to the bay-window
and stood there gazing out into the sickly night, paling before the
first grays of the morning. He was subdued by this spectacle of the
other side of speculation, wondering how many similar scenes were taking
place in sleepless rooms somewhere in the dusky flight of roof-tops.
Marsh, misunderstanding his mood, said:

"How did it hurt you? You pulled through all right, didn't you?"

Bojo came back thoughtfully, evading the question with another.

"And you?"

"Oh, better than I expected," said Marsh with a wry face. "I say, you're
not--not cleaned out?"

Granning rose and with his heavy hand turned him around solicitously.
"How about it, son?"

For hours Bojo had been debating his answer to this inevitable question
without finding a solution. He drew his pocketbook and slowly extracted
the check. "Gaze on that," he said solemnly.

Granning took it, stared at it, and passed it to Marsh, who looked up
with an exclamation: "For God's sake, what does that mean?"

"It means," said Bojo slowly, "that I can tell you the truth now. We
haven't lost a cent; on the contrary--" he paused and emphasized the
next word--"_we_ have made a killing. We means you, Fred, and myself."

"I don't get it," said Marsh, frowning.

"The real object of the pool was not to bear Pittsburgh & New Orleans,
but to buy it. If I let you sell short, it was only to get others to
sell short. To-morrow I'll settle up with you and Fred, every cent
you've lost, plus--"

"Bojo, you're lying," said Marsh abruptly.

"I'm not, I--"

"And you're lying badly!"

"What about that check?"

"That's all right; Drake may have done what you said, but you never
knew--"

"Roscy, I swear."

"Hold up and answer this. Do you want me to believe, Tom Crocker, that
you deliberately told me and Fred DeLancy, your closest friends, a lie,
in order to get us to spread false information to _our_ friends, to ruin
our friends in order to