"Now," went on Mr. Bayard briskly, "I can give you the rougher outlines of what will occur. This report, as I told you, may be weeks in finding its way into the Senate. Stocks opened the year very strong; the markets are upon an upgrade. While the boom continues, the pool will do nothing. The moment prices show a weakness our friends will act. Given three days of falling prices, this report will come out. The Senate will be invoked to an attack upon Northern Consolidated. The pool will spring upon the market, right and left, selling thousands upon thousands of shares. They will try for a stampede. They look to drop Northern Consolidated twenty-five points, as woodmen fell a tree."
"And what is to be our course?" asked Richard.
"We shall buy every share of Northern Consolidated as fast as it is offered; go with them to the end. They will find themselves in their own net.
"Since our first talk," Mr. Bayard continued, "I have been gathering information. Of the one million shares which form the stock of Northern Consolidated, over six hundred thousand are held in England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Denmark, and even a bundle or two in Sweden. I shall keep the cables warm to-morrow. The day following, our agents will be quietly buying those European shares at private sale in London, Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Copenhagen, Hamburg, Stockholm, wherever they are to be found. Should they give us a week, we shall have so narrowed the field of operations for our 'bears' that their first day's sales will land them in a corner. Once we have them penned, we may take our time. They will be as helpless as so many caged animals."
When Storri on that jealous evening left the San Reve, his nerves were somewhat tossed and shaken. It was not over-late; he would stroll to the club by roundabout paths, the walk and cold night air might steady him.
That roundabout route led Storri past the Treasury Building, and, as he slowly paced the pavement bordering one side of the massive structure, he was brought to sudden stop by a heavy timber platform six feet square and lifted a foot and a half from the ground, which cumbered the sidewalk nearest the curb. Storri surveyed the platform in a lack-luster way. It had, from its appearance, been there years; it was strange he had never noticed it before.
An old man, one of the night guards of the Treasury, buttoned to the chin, was standing in a narrowish basement door-way of the great building not fifteen feet away. The old man took his pipe out of his mouth, and seeing Storri survey the obstructing platform, observed:
"If I had a sack or two of the billions of gold that's been dumped on that platform, I wouldn't be smokin' my pipe 'round here to-night."
Gold as a term never failed to attract the Storri ear. He opened converse with the old man of the pipe. It was to this heavy platform the treasure-wagons backed up when they brought bullion to the Treasury. Storri learned another thing that gave him the sort of thrill that setters feel when in the near vicinity of a covey of grouse. The vault that held the gold reserve was within sixty feet of him as he stood in the street. Just inside those thick, hopeless walls they lay—millions of piled-up yellow treasure. Storri stared hard at the impassive granite and licked his lips. The nearness of those millions pleased him like music.
"Sixty feet!" exclaimed Storri unctuously. "That doesn't sound far, but before a robber pierced such a wall as that he would fancy it far enough."