Yet his immediate business worries were not all, nor the worst of his troubles:  his physical powers were waning.  To all appearances he was as strong as ever, but a strange bodily lassitude hampered him; he tired easily, and against this handicap he was forced to struggle continually.  He had never rightly valued his amazing equipment of energy until now, when some subtle ailment had begun to sap it.  The change was less in his muscular strength than in his nerves and his mental vigor.  He found himself growing peculiarly irritable; his failures excited spasms of blind fury which left him weak and spent; he began to suffer the depressing tortures of insomnia.  At times the nerves in his face and neck twitched unaccountably, and this distressing affection spread.

These symptoms had first manifested themselves after his unmerciful drubbing at the hands of Dan Appleton:  but they were not the result of any injury; they were due to some deeper cause.  When he had recovered his senses, after the departure of Dan and Natalie, he had fallen into a paroxysm of anger that lasted for days; he had raged and stormed like a madman, for, to say nothing of other humiliations, he prided himself extravagantly on his physical prowess.  While the marks of the rough treatment he had suffered were disappearing he remained indoors, plunged in such abysmal fury that neither Gloria nor the fawning Denny dared approach him.  The very force of his emotions had permanently disturbed his poise, or perhaps effected some obscure lesion in his brain.  Even when he showed himself again in public he was still abnormally choleric.  His fits of passion became almost apoplectic in their violence; they caused his associates to shun him as a man dangerous, and in his calmer moments he thought of them with alarm.  He had tried to regain his nervous control, but without success, and his wife’s anxiety only chafed him further.  Gradually he lost his mental buoyancy, and for the first time in his life he really yielded to pessimism.  He found he could no longer attack a problem with his accustomed certainty of conquering it, but was haunted by a foreboding of inevitable failure.  All in all, when he reached the States on his critical mission he knew that he was far from being his old self, and he had deteriorated more than he knew.

A week or two of disappointments should have shown him the futility of further effort; at any other time it would have set him to putting his house in order for the final crash, but now it merely enraged him.  He redoubled his activity, launching a new campaign of publicity so extravagant and ill-timed as to repel the assistance he needed.  He had lost his finesse; his nicely adjusted financial sense had gone.

The outcome was not long delayed; it came in the form of a newspaper despatch to the effect that his Cortez bank had suspended payment because of a run started by the dissatisfied employees of the railroad.  Through Gordon’s flamboyant advertising his enterprises were so well known by this time that the story was featured despite his efforts to kill it.  His frantic cables to Cortez for a denial only brought assurances that the report was true and that conditions would not mend unless a shipment of currency was immediately forthcoming.