Men must not think of him as one beaten and murdered.  They must remember him as his own executioner.  Surely the lawyers would find a way.  Surely their cleverness would circumvent the restrictions framed by these gamblers on the chances of life and death.

He opened the poetry volume at a point where a page was turned down, then, standing by the electric light, boldly straight and without the air of a man who entertains fear of life or death, he read aloud and with excellent elocutionary effect ...

    “I only loved one country in my life
    And that was France:  I saw her break her heart
    Against the cruel squares:  then the last order
    Broke from my lips as coolly as a smile. 
    God!  How they rode!  All France was in that last
    Charge; and France broke her heart for me....”

He paused and a deep melancholy spread over the features until the eyes might truly have been those of broken dreams gazing seaward from the rocks of St. Helena.  He glanced again at the pages and quoted softly.

“Ninette, Ninette, remember the Old Guard!”

After that he laid the book aside and turned the thumbed pages of the blank book.  These were pages scrawled across in a boy’s round hand.  The man who had once been that boy stopped when he came to an entry written long ago by lamplight in an unheated attic, with frozen branches scraping the roof and the eaves.

“There is something in me,” he read, “that tells me no man was ever greater than I’ve got it in me to be.  John Hayes Hammond, Carnegie, Rockefeller, Frick were all poor boys....”  He paused once more and let his eyes wander to the bottom of the page and dwell upon this addendum.  “P.S.  I sold them to Slivers Martin for ten dollars ($10.00) and they only cost me seven—­and he had to go after them.”

As he held the book in his hand he was interrupted by a low knock on the door.  Perhaps the night watch-man had come up with a question.  Hastily laying the diary of his boyhood over the pistol so as to conceal it he opened the door—­and Len Haswell entered.

The broker’s ruin had been complete, and his dual troubles had evidently driven him to demoralization of another sort.  His face wore a set such as artists give the features of Death—­the pale implacability of doom.  He loomed there gigantic and silent; strangely altered by his chalky pallor and the dark rings out of which his eyes burned.  After a moment Hamilton Burton inquired coolly, “Well, Haswell?”

“You may recall,” said the deep voice in a tone of menacing quiet, “that during the two days when you scattered ruin broadcast—­and ruined yourself into the bargain—­I led your forces on the floor of the Exchange.”

“Perfectly,” was the calm response.  “I recall that you lost everything.  So did I. We seem to be fellow-unfortunates.”

“You say I lost everything.”  Haswell drew a step nearer and held out his two mighty hands.  “You are mistaken.  I still have these.”