“Damn him!” etc., etc.  And with this the book would drop from his lap and he begin pacing the floor, his eyes on the carpet, his broad shoulders bent in his anxiety to solve the problem which haunted him night and day:—­how to get Harry back under his roof and not yield a jot or tittle of his pride or will—­or, to be more explicit, now that the mountain would not come to Mahomet, how could Mahomet get over to the mountain?

His friend and nearest neighbor, John Gorsuch, who was also his man of business, opened the way.  The financier’s clerk had brought him a letter, just in by the afternoon coach, and with a glance at its contents the shrewd old fellow had at once ordered his horse and set out for Moorlands, some two miles distant.  Nor did he draw rein or break gallop until he threw the lines to a servant beside the lower step of the colonel’s porch.

“It’s the Patapsco again!  It will close its doors before the week is out!” he cried, striding into the library, where the colonel, who had just come in from inspecting a distant field on his estate, sat dusting his riding-boots with his handkerchief.

“Going to stop payment!  Failed!  What the devil do you mean, John?”

“I mean just what I say!  Everything has gone to bally-hack in the city.  Here’s a letter I have just received from Harding—­he’s on the inside, and knows.  He thinks there’s some crooked business about it; they have been loaning money on all sorts of brick-bats, he says, and the end has come, or will to-morrow.  He wanted to post me in time.”

The colonel tossed his handkerchief on his writing-table:  “Who will be hurt?” he asked hurriedly, ignoring the reference to the dishonesty of the directors.

“Oh!—­a lot of people.  Temple, I know, keeps his account there.  He was short of cash a little while ago, for young Pawson, who has his law office in the basement of his house, offered me a mortgage on his Kennedy Square property, but I hadn’t the money at the time and didn’t take it.  If he got it at last—­and he paid heavily for it if he did—­the way things have been going—­and if he put that money in the Patapsco, it will be a bad blow to him.  Harry, I hear, is with him—­so I thought you ought to know.”

Rutter had given a slight start at the mention of Temple’s name among the crippled, and a strange glitter still lingered in his eyes.

“Then I presume my son is dependent on a beggar,” he exclaimed, rising from his seat, stripping off his brown velveteen riding-jacket and hanging it in a closet behind his chair.

“Yes, it looks that way.”

Gorsuch was watching the colonel closely.  He had another purpose in making his breakneck ride.  He didn’t have a dollar in the Patapsco, and he knew the colonel had not; he, like himself, was too shrewd a man to be bitten twice by the same dog; but he had a large interest in Harry and would leave no stone unturned to bring father and son together.