From acting as component parts in a body that exists as a moral protest against the wrongs of the world and the unrelenting hands of the usurpers of the right of the people, these forty men go forth as an army of crusaders.

On the committee of forty there is not a man who has not argued his conscience into a state of appreciation of the worthiness of the action he is to perform.

It is past midnight.  Two months from this date, on October thirteenth, the fulfillment of the vows the men have taken, must be made.  In the sixty days that are to intervene will any of these intrepid wills bend under the pressure of mental anxiety?  Will any of them prove a modern Judas?

Nevins is the last to quit the store-room.  He is nervous, almost hysterical; his thin classical features are distorted and tense, as though he were undergoing actual physical pain.  And indeed to his sensitive nature, the events of the night are sufficient to unnerve his mind and body.

He is to meet Carl Metz and Hendrick Stahl in the morning, to start for the East.

“The syndicate of annihilation is now incorporated,” he observes, half aloud.  “I am no longer the promoter; now I assume a place as one of the avengers of the people.  God alone knows how repugnant this plan for physical vengeance is to me, yet it is better than to permit a storm of anarchy to come upon us.  And the conditions that exist cannot long continue.”

Although every man has been called upon to make a personal sacrifice there is none who makes a greater one than he.  It is not alone the relinquishment of his position in the world as a patient and industrious worker; his sacrifice of love; the obliteration of his hope for preferment, but the extinction of life itself at an age when all men cherish it most highly.

Nevins is in the heyday of manhood; his forty years and six having been spent in the perfection of his mental and physical forces.  He is equipped with a quick, perceptive brain that grasps the intricacies of a problem almost intuitively; his logic is profound.  Years of study have made his mind a storehouse of knowledge.

To Nevins, in the allotment of the proscribed, has fallen the head of the money trust, a multi-millionaire banker, a financial Magnate known throughout the civilized world as the most rapacious miser on record.  This man has repeatedly shown that he has no regard for honesty of purpose, and his moral appreciation is imperceptible.  To recount the deeds of cunning, of fraud, of gigantic robbery that he has committed in his relentless quest for wealth, would be to retell the story of wrecked railroads, enormously profitable bond issues and Wall street panics of the past decade.  The obituaries of the hundreds he has ruined afford the best method of arriving at a partial conception of his power for evil.

“What a privilege to rid the world of this genius of evil!” is Nevins’s inward comment as he reads the fatal slip and sees that upon him has fallen the lot to execute the sentence of annihilation upon James Golding, the King of Wall street.