To-day I know what it means to be put on the chopping-block of the 'System' butchers. I know what it is to see my heart and the heart of one I love--and yours, too, Jim--systematically skewered to those of the hundreds and thousands of victims who have gone before. Jim, we must be three millions losers, and the men who have our money have so many, many millions that they can't live long enough even to thumb them over. Men who will use our money on the gambling-table, at the race-tracks, squander it on stage harlots, or in turning their wives and daughters or their neighbours' wives and daughters into worse than stage harlots. Men, Jim, who are not fit, measured by any standard of decency, to walk the same earth as you and Judge Sands. Men whose painted pets pollute the very air that such as Beulah Sands must breathe. I've learned my lesson to-day. I thought I knew the game of finance, but I'm suddenly awakened to a realisation of the dense ignorance I wallowed in. Jim, but for the loading of the dice, I should now have been taking Beulah Sands to her father with the money that the h.e.l.lish 'System' stole from him. Later I should have taken her to the altar, and after, who knows but that I should have had the happiest home and family in all the world, and lived as her people and mine have lived for generations, honest, G.o.d-fearing, law-abiding, neighbour-loving men and women, and then died as men should die? But now, Jim, I see a black, awful picture. No, I'm not morbid, I'm going to make a heroic effort to put the picture out of sight; but I'm afraid, Jim, I'm afraid."

He stopped as we pulled up on the sidewalk in front of Randolph & Randolph's office. "Here it is on the bulletin. See what did the trick, Jim. They held the Sugar meeting last night instead of waiting till to-morrow, and cut the dividend instead of increasing it. The world won't know it until to-morrow. Then they will know it, then they will know it.

They will read it in the headlines of the papers--a few suicides, a few defaulters, a few new convicts, an unclaimed corpse or two at the morgue; a few innocent girls, whose fathers' fortunes have gone to swell Camemeyer's and 'Standard Oil's' already uncountable gold, turned into streetwalkers; a few new palaces on Fifth Avenue, and a few new libraries given to communities that formerly took pride in building them from their honestly earned savings. A report or two of record-breaking diamond sales by Tiffany to the kings and czars of dollar royalty, then front-page news stories of clawing, mauling, and hair-pulling wrangles among the stage harlots for the possession of these diamonds. They were not quite sure that the dividend cut alone would do the trick, and they were taking no chances, these mighty warriors of the 'System,' so their hireling Senate committee held a session last night and unanimously reported to put sugar on the free list. The people will read that in the morning, and probably the day after they'll be told that the committee held another session to-night and unanimously reported to take it off the free list. By that time these honourable statesmen will have loaded up with the stock that you and I and Beulah Sands sold, and that other poor devils will slaughter to-morrow after reading their morning papers."

Bob's bitterness was terrible. My heart was torn as I listened. He stalked through the office and into that of Beulah Sands. I followed. She was at her desk, and when she looked up, her great eyes opened in wonderment as they took in Bob, his grim, set face, the defiant, sullen desperation of the big brown eyes, the dishevelled hair and clothes. For an instant she stood as one who had seen an apparition.

"Look me over, Beulah Sands," he said, "look me over to your heart's content, for you may never again see the fool of fools in all the world, the fool who thought himself competent to cope with men of brains, with men who really know how to play the game of dollars as it is played in this Christian age. Don't ask me not to call you Beulah; that what I tried to do was for you is the one streak of light in all this black h.e.l.l.

Beulah, Beulah, we are ruined, you, your father, and I, ruined, and I'm the fool who did it."

She rose from her desk with all the quiet, calm dignity that we had been admiring for three months, and stood facing Bob. She did not seem to see me; she saw nothing but the man who had gone out that morning the personification of hope, who now stood before her the picture of black despair, and she must have thought, "It was all for me." Suddenly she took the lapels of his torn coat in either hand. She had to reach up to do it, this winsome little Virginia lady. With her big calm blue eyes looking straight into his, she said:

"Bob."

That was all, but the word seemed to change the very atmosphere in the room. The look of desperation faded from Bob's face, and as though the words had sprung the hidden catch to the doors of his storehouse of pent-up misery, his eyes filled with hot, blinding tears. His great chest was convulsed with sobs. Again--clear, calm, fearless, and tender, came the one syllable, "Bob." And at that Bob's self-control slipped the leash. With a hoa.r.s.e cry, he threw his arms around her and crushed her to his breast. The sacredness of the scene made me feel like an intruder, and I started to leave the room. But in a moment Beulah Sands was her usual self and, turning to me, she said: "Mr. Randolph, please forget what you have seen. For an instant, as I saw Mr. Brownley's awful misery, I thought of nothing but what he had done for me, what he had tried to do for my father, what a penalty he has paid. From what you said when you left and the fact that I got no word from either of you, I feared the worst and did not dare look at the tape; I simply waited and hoped and--prayed. Yes, I prayed as my mother taught me I should pray whenever I was helpless and could do nothing myself. And I felt that G.o.d would not let the n.o.ble work of two such men be overthrown by those you were battling with. In the midst of a calmness that I took for a good omen, you came. Can you blame me for forgetting myself? Mr. Brownley," the voice was now calm and self-controlled, "tell me what you have done. Where do we stand?" "There is little to tell," Bob answered. "Camemeyer and 'Standard Oil' have taken me into camp as they would take a stuck pig. They have made a monkeyfied a.s.s out of me, and we are ruined, and I have caused Mr.

Randolph a heavy loss. Roughly, I figure that of your four hundred thousand capital and the million four hundred thousand profit you had this morning, only your capital remains."

Wishing to spare Bob, I interrupted and myself gave the girl briefly the details of what had happened. She listened intently and seemed to take in all the trickery of the "System" masters; seemed to see just what it meant to us and to her. But she made no comment, showed by no outward sign that she suffered. As soon as I was through she turned to Bob, who had stood with his eyes fastened upon her face, as though somewhere out of its soft beauty must come an a.s.surance that this was all a bad dream.

"Mr. Brownley," she said, "let us figure up just where we stand, so that we may know what to do to recoup. You have said so many times, since I have been here, that Wall Street is magic land; that no man may tell twenty-four hours ahead what will happen to him. You have said it so many times that I believe it. We know that this morning we were at the goal, that we were millions ahead, and all from twenty-four hours' effort. We have yet almost three months left, and I do not see why we have not just as much chance as we had day before yesterday. Yes, and more, because we know more now. Next time we will include the dividend cuts and the Senate duplicity in our figuring."

We both dumbly stared in wondering admiration at this marvellous woman.

Was it possible that a girl could have such nerve, such courage? Or had woman's hope, so persistent where her loved ones are concerned, made Beulah Sands blind to the awfulness of the situation? As I looked at her I could not doubt that she fully realised our position, that she was really suffering more than either of us, that she was only acting to ease Bob's anguish. Bob brought out his memoranda, and in half an hour we had the figures. The total loss was nearly three millions. As Beulah Sands's 20,000 shares had cost less than ours and Bob figured to leave her capital of $400,000 intact, we felt some comfort. Beulah Sands had watched the figuring with the keenness of an expert, and when Bob announced the final figures, which showed that she still had what she started with, she drew the sheet containing the totals to her. "I was willing to accept your a.s.sistance," she said, "when the deal promised a profit to all of us, because I appreciated your goodness and knew how much it would hurt your feelings if I were churlish about the division; but now that we all lose I must stand my fair share; I must." She said this in a way that we both knew precluded the possibility of argument. "We owned together 150,000 shares. I was to have had the profits on 20,000 shares. Our total loss is $2,775,000, of which I must bear my just proportion. Mr. Brownley, you will see that $370,000 is charged to my account. I shall have $30,000 left. If our cause is as just as we think, G.o.d in his goodness will make this ample for our purposes."

Though Bob and I were in despair at her determination to strip herself of what Bob had worked so hard to acc.u.mulate, we could not help feeling a reverence for her faith and her st.u.r.dy independence. She now showed us in her delicate way that she wished to be alone; as we went she held out her hand to Bob. "Mr. Brownley, please, for the sake of the work we have to do, look on the bright side of this calamity, for it has a bright side.

You wanted me to send word to my father that we were about to grasp victory. Think if we had sent it--then you will know that G.o.d is good, even when we think he is chastening us beyond endurance."

Bob took me into his office. "Jim, you see what a woman can do, and we are taught women are the weaker s.e.x. Now listen to what you must do. Accept my notes for the whole loss, less one hundred thousand which I have to my credit, and which I will pay on account. I won't listen to any objection.

The deal was mine; you came in only to help us out, and I ought never to have tempted you. If I remain in my present busted condition, the notes will be blank paper. Therefore you do me no harm in taking them. If I should strike it rich, I should never feel like a man until I made up the loss."

It was no use arguing with him in his inflexible mood, so I took his demand notes for $2,405,000. I begged him to go home with me to dinner, but he insisted that he could not face my wife with his last night's break still fresh in her mind. Next day he did not turn up. Along in the afternoon I received a telegram from him, saying that he was on his way to Virginia, that he needed a rest and would be back in a week. I was worried, nervous. It takes until the next day and the day after, and the week after that, to get down to the deepest misery of an upset such as we had been through. I did not feel easy with Bob out of sight while he was sounding for a new footing. I went to Beulah Sands in hope we might talk over the affair, but when I told her that Bob was to be gone for a week and that I was uneasy, she said in her calm, confident manner: "I don't think there is anything to worry about, Mr. Randolph. Mr. Brownley is too much of a man to allow an affair of dollars to do anything more than annoy him. He will be back all the better for his rest." She dropped her long lashes in a this-conversation-is-closed way that we had come to know meant going time.

Chapter IV.

The following week Bob returned to the office. He had not changed, and yet he had changed greatly. Rest had apparently done much for him. His colour was good, his step elastic as of old, and his head was thrown back as if he were buckled up for the fray and wanted all to know it. Yet there was something in the eye, in the setness of the jaw, in the hair-trigger calm, yet fiercely savage grip in which he closed his strong hands on the arms of his chair, that told me more plainly than words that this was not the optimistic, soft-hearted Bob Brownley I had known and loved. I could not help feeling that if I had been a leader of the Russian terrorists, and this man who now sat before me had come to my ken when I was selecting bomb-throwers, I should have seized upon him of all men as the one to stalk the Czar or his marked minions. Surely the iron that had entered Bob's soul a week before had affected his whole being. I think Beulah Sands had some such thoughts. For I saw a shadow of perplexity cross her broad, low forehead after her first meeting with him, a shadow that had not been there before.

For days after Bob's return I saw little of him. I think Beulah Sands saw less. During Stock Exchange hours he spent most of his time on the floor, but he executed few of our orders. He merely looked them over and handed them out to his a.s.sistants. As far as I could learn, he spent much of his time there yesterdaying through hope's graveyards, a not uncommon pastime for active Exchange members whose first through specials have been open-switched by the "System" towerman. So strong had become this habit of going about from pole to pole with bent head and a far-off gaze that his fellow members began to humour and respect it. They all knew that Bob had gone up against the Sugar panic hard. No one knew how hard, but all guessed from his changed appearance and habits that it must have been a bone-smashing blow. Nothing so quickly and so deeply stirs a Stock Exchange man's feelings for his brother member as to know that "They" have ditched his El Dorado flyer--that is, if he has been a good the books showed no change in Beulah Sands's account. There was the poor little $30,000 balance; no other entries. One afternoon Beulah Sands had asked for a meeting between Bob and myself in her office. She could hardly have asked Bob to come without me, but I knew it was Bob she wanted to see, and I felt that the best thing I could do for them was to leave them alone. So I made some excuse for a moment's delay at my desk, telling Bob to go on into her office, and promising to follow shortly. He went in, leaving the door partly open. I think that from the moment he entered the room both of them utterly forgot my existence. From her desk Beulah could not see me, and Bob sat so that his back was half toward me. "I dislike to trouble you about my account," I heard her begin in a voice a trifle uneven, "but as I must go back to Father Christmas week, I wanted to get your advice as to the advisability of writing him that, though there is still a chance for doing wonders, I do not think we shall be able to save him. Of course I won't put it in just that blunt way, but it seems to me I should begin to prepare him for the blow. I have not talked over any more plunging with you, Mr. Brownley, since the unlucky one in Sugar, and----"

"Miss Sands, I understand what you mean," Bob broke in, "and I should apologise for not having consulted with you about your business affairs.

The fact is, I have not been quite clear as to the best thing to do. I hope you don't think I have forgotten. Never for a moment since I took charge of your affairs have I forgotten my promise to see that they were kept active. Truly I have been trying to think out some successful plunge, but--but"--there was a hoa.r.s.eness in his voice--"I have not had my old confidence in myself since that day in Sugar when I killed your hopes and destroyed the chance of saving your father--no, I have not had that confidence a man must have in himself to win at this game."

There was a silence, and then I heard an indescribable fluttering rush that told as plainly as sight could have done that a woman had answered her heart's call. Looking up involuntarily, I saw a sight that for a long moment held my eyes as if I had been fascinated. It was Bob bowed forward with his face hidden in his hands and beside him, on her knees, Beulah Sands, her arms about his neck, his head drawn down to her bosom. "Bob, Bob," she said chokingly, "I cannot stand it any longer. My heart is breaking for you. You were so happy when I came into your life, and the happiness is changed to misery and despair, and all for me, a stranger. At first I thought of nothing but father and how to save him, but since that day when those men struck at your heart, I have been filled with, oh! such a longing to tell you, to tell you, Bob----"

"What? Beulah, what? For the love of G.o.d, don't stop; tell me, Beulah, tell me." He had not lifted his head. It was buried on her breast, his arms closed around her. She bent her head and laid her beautiful, soft cheek, down which the tears were now streaming, against his brown hair.

"Bob, forgive me, but I love you, love you, Bob, as only a woman can love who has never known love before, never known anything but stern duty. Bob, night after night when all have left I have crept into your office and sat in your chair. I have laid my head on your desk and cried and cried until it seemed as though I could not live till morning without hearing you say that you loved me, and that you did not mind the ruin I had brought into your life. I have patted the back of your chair where your dear head had rested. I have covered the arms of your chair, that your strong, brave hands had gripped, with kisses. Night after night I have knelt at your desk and prayed to G.o.d to shield you, to protect you from all harm, to brush away the black cloud I brought into your life. I have asked Him to do with me, yes, with my father and mother, anything, anything if only He would bring back to you the happiness I had stolen. Bob, I have suffered, suffered, as only a woman can suffer."

She was sobbing as though her heart would break, sobbing wildly, convulsively, like the little child who in the night comes to its mother's bed to tell of the black goblins that have been pursuing it. Long before she had finished speaking--and it took only a few heart-beats for that rush of words--I had broken the power of the fascination that held me, had turned away my eyes, and tried not to listen. For fear of breaking the spell, I did not dare cross the room to close Beulah's door or to reach the outer door of my office, which was nearer hers than it was to my desk.

I waited--through a silence, broken only by Beulah's weeping, that seemed hour-long. Then in Bob's voice came one low sob of joy:

"Beulah, Beulah, my Beulah!"

I realised that he had risen. I rose too, thinking that now I could close the door. But again I saw a picture that transfixed me. Bob had taken Beulah by both shoulders and he held her off and looked into her eyes long and beseechingly. Never before nor since have I seen upon human face that glorious joy which the old masters sought to get into the faces of their worshippers who, kneeling before Christ, tried to send to Him, through their eyes, their soul's grat.i.tude and love. I stood as one enthralled.

Slowly and as reverently as the living lover touches the brow of his dead wife, Bob bent his head and kissed her forehead. Again and again he drew her to him and implanted upon her brow and eyes and lips his kisses. I could not stand the scene any longer. I started to the corridor-door, and then, as though for the first time either had known I was within hearing, they turned and stared at me. At last Bob gave a long deep sigh, then one of those reluctant laughs of happiness yet wet with sobs.

"Well, Jim, dear old Jim, where did you come from? Like all eavesdroppers, you have heard no good of yourself. Own up, Jim, you did not hear a word good or bad about yourself, for it is just coming back to me that we have been selfish, that we have left you entirely out of our business conference."

We all laughed, and Beulah Sands, with her face a bloom of burning blushes, said: "Mr. Randolph, we have not settled what it is best to do about father's affairs."

After a little we did begin to talk business, and finally agreed that Beulah should write her father, wording her letter as carefully as possible, to avoid all direct statements, but showing him that she had made but little headway on the work she had come North to accomplish. Bob was a changed being now; so, too, was Beulah Sands. Both discussed their hopes and fears with a frankness in strange contrast to their former manner. But there was one point on which Bob showed he was holding back. I finally put it to him bluntly: "Bob, are you working out anything that looks like real relief for Miss Sands and her father?"

"I don't know how to answer you, Jim. I can only say I have some ideas, radical ones perhaps, but--well, I am thinking along certain lines."

I saw he was not yet willing to take us into his confidence. We parted, Bob going along in the cab with Miss Sands.

Two days afterward she sent for us both as soon as we got to the office.

"I have this telegram from father--it makes me uneasy: 'Mailed to-day important letter. Answer as soon as you receive.'"

The following afternoon the letter came. It showed Judge Sands in a very nervous, uneasy state. He said he had been living a life of daily terror, as some of his friends, for whose estates he was trustee, had been receiving anonymous letters, advising them to look into the judge's trust affairs; that the Reinhart crowd had been using renewed pressure to make him let go all his Seaboard stock, which they wanted to secure at the low prices to which they had depressed it, in order that they might reorganise and carry out the scheme they had been so long planning. Judge Sands went on to say that the day he was compelled to sell his Seaboard stock he would have to make public an announcement of his condition, as there could be no sale without the court's consent. His closing was:

"My dear daughter, no one knows better than I the almost hopelessness of expecting any relief from your operations. But so hopeless have I become of late, so much am I reliant upon you, my dear child, and eternal hope so springs in all of us when confronted with great necessities, that I have hoped and still hope that you are to be the saviour of your family; that you, only a frail child, are through G.o.d's marvellous workings to be the one to save the honour of that name we both love more than life; the one to keep the wolf of poverty from that door through which so far has come nothing but the sunshine of prosperity and happiness; the one, my dear Beulah, who is to save your old father from a dishonoured grave. Dear child, forgive me for placing upon your weak shoulders the additional burden of knowing I am now helpless and compelled to rely absolutely upon you. After you have read my letter, if there is no hope, I command you to tell me so at once, for although I am now financially and almost mentally helpless, I am still a Sands, and there has never yet been one of the name who shirked his duty, however stern and painful it might be."

When I handed the letter back to Miss Sands, she said:

"Mr. Randolph, let me tell you and Mr. Brownley a little about my father and our home, that you may see our situation as it is. My father is one of the n.o.blest men that ever lived. I am not the only one who says that--if you were to ask the people of our State to name the one man who had done most for the State as a State, most for her progressive betterment, most for her people high and low, white and black, they would answer, 'Judge Lee Sands.' He has been, and is, the idol of our people. After he was graduated from Harvard, he entered the law office of my grandfather, Senator Robert Lee Sands. Before he was thirty he was in Congress and was even then reputed the greatest orator of our State, where orators are so plentiful. He married my mother, his second cousin, Julia Lee, of Richmond, at twenty-five, and from then until the attack of that ruthless money-shark, led a life such as a true man would map out for himself if his Maker granted him the privilege. You would have to visit at our home to appreciate my father's character and to understand how terrible this sorrow is to him. Every morning of his life he spends an hour after breakfast with my dear mother, who is a cripple from hip disease. He takes her in his arms and brings her down from her room to the library as if she were a child. He then reads to her--and he knows good books as well as he knows his friends. After he takes mother back to her room, he gives an hour to our people, the blacks of the plantation and his white tenants throughout the county. He is a father to them all. He settles all their troubles, big and little. Then for hours he and I go over his business affairs. Every afternoon from four to five he devotes to his estates and the men and women for whom he acts as trustee. He has often said to me: 'We have a clear million of money and property, and that is all any man should have in America. It is all he is ent.i.tled to under our form of government. Any more than that an honest man should in one way or another return to the people from whom he has taken it. I never want my family to have more than a million dollars.' When he went into the Seaboard affair, he explained to me that it was to a.s.sist the Wilsons--they were old friends, and he has acted as their solicitor for years--in building up the South. He discussed with me the right and advisability of putting in the trust funds. He said he considered it his duty to employ them as he did his own in enterprises that would aid the whole people of the South, instead of sending them to the North to be used in Wall Street as belting for the 'System' grinder. These fortunes were made in the South by men who loved their section of the country more than they did wealth, and why should they not be employed to benefit that part of the country which their makers and owners loved? I remember vividly how perplexed he was when, at the beginning, the Wilsons would show him that the investments were returning unusually large profits.

"'It is not right, Beulah,' he said to me one morning after receiving a letter from Baltimore to the effect that Seaboard stock and bonds had advanced until his investment showed over fifty per cent, profit, 'it is not right for us to make this money. No man in America should make over legal rates of interest and a fair profit on an investment, that is, an investment of capital pure and simple, particularly in a transportation company, where every dollar of profit comes from the people who patronise the lines. I have worked it out on every side, and it is not right; it would not be legal if the people, who make the laws for their own betterment, understood their affairs as they should.'

"He was always writing to the Wilsons to conduct the affairs of the Seaboard so that there would be remaining each year only profits enough to keep the road up and the wharves in good condition and to pay the annual interest and a fair dividend. And when the Wilsons came to our house to lay before him the offer of Reinhart and his fellow plunderers to pay enormous profits for the control of the Seaboard, he was indignant and argued with them that the offer was an insult to honest men. It was he who advised the trusteeship control of the Seaboard stock to prevent Reinhart from securing control. I sat in the library when he talked to the elder Wilson and the directors.

"He appealed directly to John Wilson to make an effort to stop the growing tendency to use the people as p.a.w.ns to enslave themselves and their children. He said some man of undoubted probity, standing, and wealth, someone whom the people trusted, must start the fight against these New York fiends, whose only thought is to roll up wealth. And he told John Wilson he was the man, since he had great wealth, honestly got by his father and grandfather; no one would accuse him of being a hypocrite, seeking notoriety, and his standing in the financial world was so old and solid that it would have to listen to him. I remember-how emphatically father said: 'I tell you, John, _even the discussion_ of such a proposition as that scoundrel Reinhart makes is degrading to an American's honour.' He said it didn't make the least difference if Reinhart counted his millions by the score, and was director in thirty or forty great inst.i.tutions, and gave a fortune every year for charity and to the church--that he was a blackleg just the same. And so is any man, he said, who dares to say he will take the stock of a transportation company, which represents a certain amount of money invested, and double or multiply it by five and ten, simply because he can compel the people to pay exorbitant fares and freight-rates and so get profits on this fraudulently increased capital.

"It was the decision arrived at by father and the Wilsons at this meeting, a decision to refuse in any circ.u.mstances to allow our Southern people to be bled by the Wall Street 'System,' that started Reinhart and his dollar-fiends on the war-path. You can see from what I tell you of my father the terrible condition he is in now. At night, when I get to thinking of him, hoping against hope, with no one to help him, no one with whom he can talk over his affairs, when I think of his n.o.bleness in devoting his time to mother and by sheer will-power concealing from her his awful suffering, it nearly drives me mad."

"Miss Sands, why will you not let me lend you the money necessary to tide your father over for a while?" I asked.

"You are so good, Mr. Randolph, but you don't quite understand my father in spite of what I have said. He would not relieve his suffering at the expense of another, not if it were a hundred times more acute. You cannot understand the old-fashioned, deep-rooted pride of the Sands."

"But can you not, at least temporarily, disguise from him just how you have arranged the relief?"

Her big blue eyes stared at me in bewilderment.

"Mr. Randolph, I could not deceive father. I could not tell him a lie even to save his life. It would be impossible. My father abhors a lie. He believes a man or woman who would lie the lowest of the low things on earth. When I go back to my father he will say, 'Tell me what you have done.' I can just see him now, standing between the big white pillars at the end of the driveway. I can hear him say calmly, 'Beulah, my daughter, welcome. Your mother is waiting for you in her room. Do not lose a moment getting to her.' Afterward he'll take me over the plantation to show me all the familiar things, and not one word will he allow me to say about our affairs until dinner is over, until the neighbours have left, for no Sands returns from long absence without a fitting home welcome. When I have said good night to mother and sister and he has drawn up my rocker in front of his big chair in the library alcove and I've lighted his cigar for him, he will look me in the eye and say, 'Daughter, tell me all you have done.' I would no more think of holding anything back than I would of stabbing him to the heart. No, Mr. Randolph, there is no possibility of relief except in fairly using that $30,000, and fairly winning back what Wall Street has stolen from father. Even that will cause both of us many twinges of conscience, and anything more is impossible. If this cannot be done, father must, all of us must, pay the penalty of Reinhart's ruthless act."

Bob had listened, but made no comment until she was through; then he said, "It looks to me as though the market is shaping up so that we may be able to do something soon." It was evident to both of us that he had some plan in mind.