purchase all that should be brought to the hammer in their respective cities.  Following up his promise faithfully, Bullion bought all the stock of the railroad that came into State Street, and in this way rapidly exhausted his ready money.  Then he raised loans upon his other property, and still kept the market clear.  But he wondered that so many shares came to Boston for sale; for the railroad was in a Western State, and few of the original holders were New England men.

Bullion now met the first check in his career.  Kerbstone, whose appeals for help he had disregarded, and whose property had been wofully depreciated by the course of the “bears,” of whom Bullion was chief, failed for a large sum.  As he was treasurer of the Neversink Mills, the stockholders and creditors of that corporation made an immediate investigation of its accounts.  Kerbstone was found to be a defaulter to the amount of hundreds of thousands of dollars; the property was gone,—­undermined like a snow-bank in spring.  The largest owner was Bullion.  He was overreached by his own shrewdness; and the hitherto unlucky “bulls,” who had had small cause to laugh, thought that it was

    “sport to see the engineer
  Hoist with his own petard,”—­

better even than to have tossed him on their own horns.

Bullion made some wry faces; but the loss, though great, was not ruinous.  He was obliged, however, to take back the shares of the factory-stock on which he had obtained loans for his New York operations, and to substitute an equal amount of other securities,—­thus cramping his resources at a time when he needed every dollar to carry out his vast plans.

In the multiplicity of his affairs, Bullion had almost forgotten Fletcher, and left him to pursue his own course.  But there was a man who had not forgotten him, and who followed all his movements with vigilant eyes.  Sandford was convinced that Fletcher had in some way become prosperous, and he now advanced to use the peculiar note as a draft on the miserable debtor’s funds.  There was the same wily approach, the same covert allusion to Fletcher’s supposed resources, the same peremptory demand, and the same ugly threat which had so desperately maddened him when the subject was broached before.  Fletcher felt the tightening of the lasso, but could not free himself from the fatal noose.  He must pay whatever the cold-eyed creditor demanded.  Two thousand dollars was the sum asked for the acknowledgment of having appropriated five hundred.  Twopence for halfpenny has been accounted fair usury among the Jews; but in Christian communities it is only crime that accumulates interest like that.

As a measure of precaution, Sandford had made a copy of the paper and prepared an explanatory statement; these he now inclosed in an envelope, in Fletcher’s presence, and directed it to Messrs. Foggarty, Danforth, and Dot.  Then drawing out his watch, as if to make a careful computation of time, he said,—­