The whisper was confirmed.  There was no doubt of it.  Henderson’s private secretary had admitted it.  Yet it seemed incredible.  No provision had been made for it.  Speculation had not discounted it.  A panic set in.  No one knew what to do, for no one knew well the state of Henderson’s affairs.  In the first thirty minutes there was a tremendous drop in Henderson stocks.  Then some of them rallied, but before the partial recovery hundreds of men had been ruined.  It was a wild hour in the Exchange.  Certain stocks were hopelessly smashed for the time, and some combinations were destroyed; among them was one that Uncle Jerry had kept out of; and Jack Delancy was hopelessly ruined.

The event was flashed over the wires of the continent; it was bulletined; it was cried in the streets; it was the all-absorbing talk of the town.  Already, before the dead man was removed to his own house, people were beginning to moralize about him and his career.  Perhaps the truest thing was said by the old broker in the board whose reputation for piety was only equaled by his reputation of always having money to loan at exorbitant rates in a time of distress.  He said to a group of downcast operators, “In the midst of life we are in death.”

XX

The place that Rodney Henderson occupied in the mind of the public was shown by the attention the newspapers paid to his death.  All the great newspapers in all the cities of importance published long and minute biographies of him, with pictorial illustrations, and day after day characteristic anecdotes of his remarkable career.  Nor was there, it is believed, a newspaper in the United States, secular, religious, or special, that did not comment upon his life.  This was the more remarkable in that he was not a public man in the common use of the word:  he had never interested himself in politics, or in public affairs, municipal or State or national; he had devoted himself entirely to building up his private fortune.  If this is the duty of a citizen, he had discharged it with singleness of purpose; but no other duty of the citizen had he undertaken, if we except his private charities.  And yet no public man of his day excited more popular interest or was the subject of more newspaper comment.

And these comments were nearly all respectful, and most of them kindly.  There was some justice in this, for Henderson had been doing what everybody else was trying to do, usually without his good-fortune.  If he was more successful than others in trying to get rich, surely a great deal of admiration was mingled with the envy of his career.  To be sure, some journals were very severe upon his methods, and some revived the old stories of his unscrupulousness in transactions which had laid him open to criminal prosecution, from the effects of which he was only saved by uncommon adroitness and, some said, by legal technicalities.  His career also was denounced by some as wholly vicious