Kent was not lacking in native shrewdness or energy.  He foresaw, not the pitiable bubble-burst which ensued, indeed, but the certain and inevitable end of the speculative era.  Like every one else, he had bought chiefly with promises to pay, and his paper in the three banks aggregated a sum equal to a frugal New Hampshire competence.

“How long have I got?” was the laconic wire which he sent to Loring, the secretary of the Western Pacific Advisory Board in Boston, from whom his hint had come.  And when Loring replied that the grading and track-laying contracts were already awarded, there was at least one “long” on the Gaston real estate exchange who wrought desperately night and day to “unload”.

As it turned out, the race against time was both a victory and a defeat.  On the morning when the Daily Clarion sounded the first note of public 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.