"If Mr. Harley doesn't invite you by that time," returned Bess, "I will interfere. Those who can't see their duty must be shown their duty, Mr. Harley among the rest. On the whole, I think you take a very proper stand."
Storri, without a dollar, lay in his rooms like a wounded wolf. He did not go to the San Reve; he would see no one until he had worn down his anguish and regained control of himself. Hurt to the death, Storri was too cunning to furnish word of it to mankind. No one must know; it was the instinct of self-preservation. The wounded wolf, while his wounds are fresh, avoids the pack lest the pack destroy him. And so with Storri; he would hide until he could command that old-time manner of unclouded ease. He would stifle every surmise, deny every rumor if rumor blew about, of the blow he had received. A few days, and Storri would be himself again. As for immediate money, Storri would extort that from Mr. Harley, who, in his dull-head ignorance or worse, had been the author of his losses. Who first spoke of Northern Consolidated? Who suggested the "bear" raid? Was it not Mr. Harley? The affair had been his; the loss should be his; Mr. Harley must repay, or face the wrath of Storri.
"Face the wrath of Storri!" exclaimed that furious nobleman with an oath. "He would face nobody—nothing! Bah! that Harley; he is a dog and the coward son of a dog! Yes, he shall come here; he shall crawl and crouch! I, Storri, will give him the treatment due a dog!"
Storri wrote a blunt word to Mr. Harley and dispatched it to that shattered capitalist.
"Come to-night at nine, you Harley," said the note, "and do not presume to fail, or my next communication will be through one of your officers of police."
Storri was aware that the French shares were gone from him, but he counted on easily tracking them and buying them back. He would force Mr. Harley to give him the very money that was to buy them. The thought lighted up his cruel face like a red ray from the pit; it would be such a joke—such a triumph over the pig American! Meanwhile he would bully Mr. Harley, who did not know but what the shares were in his pocket.
If Storri had been informed of how, through the deep arrangements of that strategist of stocks, he had borrowed every dollar of those five hundred thousand from Mr. Bayard, as well as every share of Northern Consolidated delivered to perfect those sales that had brought him down in ruin—in short, if he had been told the whole romance, from Mr. Fopling's exhortation to "Bweak him!" to the close of the market on that crashing Friday afternoon, he might have been less sure of recapturing those French shares. But he was ignorant of those truths; and, with confidence bred of ignorance, he summoned Mr. Harley. He, Storri, would browbeat and bleed him; he would teach the caitiff Harley to be more careful of the favor, not to say the fortune, of a Russian nobleman.
Mr. Harley, with the defeat of the "bear" attack on Northern Consolidated, was left in forlornest case. He was aware that it spelled money-ruin for both him and Senator Hanway; but the picture of the rage of Storri, and what that savage might do in his bitterness, so filled up his thoughts that he scarcely heeded anything beyond. Mr. Harley was stricken sick by his own fears, and, after returning from New York on the evening of that fearful Friday, never moved from his room. To the anxious tap of Dorothy, he sent word that he was not ill, but very busy; he must not be disturbed. Like Storri, only more a-droop, Mr. Harley owned no wish for company.
Mr. Harley was thus broken to the ground when Storri's message found him. The threat at the tail, like the sting at the tail of a scorpion, stunned Mr. Harley past thinking. He could neither do nor plan; he could only utter his despair in groans.