The advertisement he had just read had taken him back fifteen years. He saw himself in England, just graduated from College, receiving the congratulations of his friends. He remembered his father's pride in his success and his kindly admonition to continue as he had begun, so that one day he might add even more distinction to the honorable name he bore. How had he followed that sage advice? No sooner released from the restraint of the University than he plunged into every form of dissipation, sowing his wild oats recklessly, blindly, utterly indifferent to the deadly crop they might one day yield. The corrupt, gay city beckoned to him, and he could not resist its pleasure-call. He scattered gold right and left on race-tracks, at cards, on women. A small inheritance turned over at his majority went speedily the way of all the rest, and then he went to the money-lenders to pay for further extravagances, incurring obligations he could not meet. Sir William, sorely disappointed, came to the rescue again and again, and, extracting a promise of reformation, made him enter Woolwich to try for a commission in the Army. Plucked at every examination, he was quickly discouraged, returned to his fast companions and gradually drifted into the aimless, loose way of living of the idle man-about-town. Debts accumulated, the creditors dunned and dogged his footsteps until life became unbearable. His father, incensed beyond hope of pardon, turned a deaf ear to further appeals, and finally cut off his allowance altogether, hoping to teach him a lesson. Soon his clothes got shabby, he was forced into cheap lodgings, his fair-weather friends forgot to bow to him.
That was the beginning of the end. He drifted lower and lower until he was forced to go to work or starve. He knew no trade. He was obliged to accept what he could get. He turned his hand to anything, often making barely enough to secure himself a night's lodging. Finally, when things seemed at their darkest, he heard there was a demand for stokers on the Blue Star Line. What he had suffered down there in that hell's furnace no man knew! The poor devils who had to do the work never survived to tell of their devilish toil. If these millionaires who liked to travel in fast ships knew the physical agony the vessel's speed cost a human being, they would refuse to patronize them. Thank God those days were over! No matter what happened, he would never go back to the stoke-hold.
That night as he lay on his cot in his Bowery lodging-house he tossed uneasily, unable to sleep, wondering what Coxe & Willoughby, Attorneys, of 27 Broad Street, wanted with him.
CHAPTER XXI.
Broad Street, just before the stock-market begins its daily orgy of frenzied finance, is perhaps the most orderly and imposing of any of the splendid thoroughfares in New York's commercial center. Strange to say, it also fits its name, having almost three times the width of any other street in the down-town district. From the Wall Street end where the Sub-Treasury faces the old-fashioned premises of J. Pierpont Morgan & Co.'s banking-house, Broad Street sweeps round in a noble curve, lined on either side with stately office-buildings, rivaling each other in beauty of architectural design. The imposing building opposite ornamented with bas reliefs and noble marble columns is the Stock Exchange, where the unsophisticated lamb is ruthlessly sheared by bull and bear, and farther on, without other roof than the blue vault of heaven, are the noisy curb brokers, so called because, having no building of their own in which to transact their business, they are permitted by time-honored custom to trade in a roped-off enclosure in the middle of the street.
It was absolutely terra incognita to Armitage, and he gazed open-eyed around him like any country yokel seeing the sights of the city for the first time. Suddenly he saw a crowd of men engaged in what seemed to be a desperate struggle in the middle of the road. They were grappling with each other, brandishing their arms and fists, yelling like Indians. It looked like a riot of serious proportions, and he wondered why the policeman who stood close by calmly looking on viewed it with such unconcern.
"What's the matter?" he queried of a passer-by.
"Matter—where?" asked the stranger, looking in all directions.
"Don't you see those men fighting?" said Armitage.