Queer safe, that of Breen & Co., and queer things went into it.  Most of them were still there.  Jack thought some jeweller had sent part of his stock down for safe-keeping when he first came across a tiny drawer of which Breen alone kept the key.  Each object could tell a story:  a pair of diamond ear-rings surely could, and so could four pearls on a gold chain, and perhaps, too, a certain small watch, the case set with jewels.  One of these days they may be redeemed, or they may not, depending upon whether the owners can scrape money enough together to pay the balances owed in cash.  But the four pearls on the gold chain are likely to remain there—­ that poor fellow went overboard one morning off Nantucket Light, and his secret went with him.

During the six months Jack had stood at his desk new faces had filled the chairs—­the talk had varied; though he felt only the weary monotony of it all.  Sometimes there had been hours of tense excitement, when even his uncle had stood by the ticker, and when every bankable security in the box had been overhauled and sent post-haste to the bank or trust company.  Jack, followed by the porter with a self-cocking revolver in his outside pocket, had more than once carried the securities himself, returning to the office on the run with a small scrap of paper good for half a million or so tucked away in his inside pocket.  Then the old monotony had returned with its dull routine and so had the chatter and talk.  “Buy me a hundred.”  “Yes, let ’em go.”  “No, I don’t want to risk it.”  “What’s my balance?” “Thought you’d get another eighth for that stock.”  “Sold at that figure, anyhow,” etc.

Under these conditions life to a boy of Jack’s provincial training and temperament seemed narrowed down to an arm-chair, a black-board, a piece of chalk and a restless little devil sputtering away in a glass case, whose fiat meant happiness or misery.  Only the tongue of the demon was in evidence.  The brain behind it, with its thousand slender nerves quivering with the energy of the globe, Jack never saw, nor, for that matter, did nine-tenths of the occupants of the chairs.  To them its spoken word was the dictum of fate.  Success meant debts paid, a balance in the bank, houses, horses, even yachts and estates—­failure meant obscurity and suffering.  The turn of the roulette wheel or the roll of a cube of ivory they well knew brought the same results, but these turnings they also knew were attended with a certain loss of prestige.  Taking a flier in the Street was altogether different—­ great financiers were behind the fluctuations of values told by the tongue of the ticker, and behind them was the wealth of the Republic and still in the far distance the power of the American people.  Few of them ever looked below the grease paint, nor did the most discerning ever detect the laugh on the clown’s face.

The boy half hidden by the glass screen, through which millions were passed and repassed every month, caught now and then a glimpse.