Stoughton bit at his thumbnail and nodded. "I suppose so—and there'll be hell to pay in St. Marys, eh, Wimperley? Our friend the chief constable will be working over time. Remember the beggar? The damn fool was right too."
"Yes, it's all right," said Wimperley, "and now I suppose there'll be writs and injunctions enough to fill the tailrace. We'd better get out and arrange some support for the market. Birch, you compound a comforting statement for the papers. We adjourn till tomorrow at nine-thirty."
They did adjourn, but lingered for an hour digging into the past seven years. It was a talk such as one might expect under the circumstances. Charged with an apprehension but thinly veiled by manner and speech, events took on for them no perspective. They were too close at hand. All this was so intimately their own and Clark's responsibility that every other consideration became instantly submerged, and it was a matter of living for the day, if not for the hour. Had any one at this time told Wimperley or Stoughton that for a pace or two they had merely fallen out of step in the march of progress, and that however depressing might be the present aspect of affairs it did not really affect the preordained outcome, they would have flouted the thought. It is not given to many men to place themselves correctly in the general scheme of the world, and to fairly estimate their own contribution. Thus it was that Wimperley and his associates read on the screen of the present only the word "failure," and were conscious chiefly of a certain self contempt for the arduous part they had played. At the last moment success had been snatched from their grasp.
Stoughton walked slowly home. He was thinking of Manson, the pessimist, who had been right. And such is the interlinking chain of life. Manson, at this moment, was sitting in his office, while his mind harked aimlessly back to the first time he had met the men from Philadelphia. He stared at a telegram that trembled between his thick fingers. His broad face was gray and ghastly. He had been here motionless for some time, when a gentle knock sounded at the door and his wife came timidly in. One glance at his face, and her arms were round his neck.
"What is it, Peter?" she quavered.
He did not look up but held the message so that she might read it.
Sold you out to-day on stop loss order at thirty-two margin being exhausted. Farthing.
She read it wonderingly. "What does it mean; who is Farthing?"
"My Toronto broker—or at least he was," said Manson heavily.
"But I don't understand, dear."