the most daring stock manipulators.  The “System’s” banks, as well as trust and insurance companies throughout the country, had for a long time been getting into shape by concentrating the money of the country for this monster trust.  It was newspaper and news bureau gossip that Reinhart and his crowd had bought millions of shares of the different stocks involved in the deal, and it was common knowledge that upon its successful completion Reinhart’s fortune would be in the neighbourhood of a billion.  On October 1st the certificate of the Anti-People’s Trust, $12,000,000,000 capital, 120,000,000 shares, were listed upon the New York, London, and Boston Stock Exchanges, and the German and French Bourses, and trading in them started off fast and furious at 106.  The claim that one billion of the twelve billions capital had been set aside to be used in protecting and manipulating the stock in the market, had been so widely advertised that even the most daring plunger did not think of selling it short.

It was evident to all in the stock-gambling world that this was to be the “System’s” grand coup, that at its completion the masses would be rudely awakened to a realisation that their savings were invested in the combined American industries at vastly inflated values, that the few had all the real money, and that any attempt upon the people’s part to regulate and control the new system of robbery, would be fraught with unparalleled disaster—­not to the “System,” but to the people.

Since Bob’s return from Europe I had seen him but a few times.  Up to October 1st he had not been near the Stock Exchange or “the Street.”  Shortly after the listing of the “People Be Damned,” as “the Street” had dubbed the new trust, he began to show up at his office regularly.  This was the condition of affairs when Fred Brownley called me up on the telephone, as I related at the beginning of my story, which I did not realise I had been so long in telling.

My thoughts had been chasing each other with lightning-like rapidity back over the last five years and the fifteen before them, and each thought deepened the black mist over my present mental vision.  In the midst of my reflections my telephone rang again.

“Mr. Randolph, for Heaven’s sake have you done nothing yet?” It was Fred Brownley’s voice.  “Things are frightful here.  Bob’s brokers are selling stocks at five and ten thousand-lot clips.  Barry Conant is leading Reinhart’s forces.  It is said he has the pool’s protection order in Anti-People’s and that it is unlimited, but Bob has the Reinhart crowd pretty badly scared.  Swan has just finished giving Conant a hundred thousand off the reel in 10,000 lots, and he told me a moment ago he was going over to get Bob himself to face Barry Conant.  They’re down twenty points on the average, although they haven’t let Anti-People’s break an eighth yet.  They have it pegged at 106, but there is an ugly rumour just in that Bob, under cover of a general attack,