He drew some loose change from his pocket, and hailed an approaching street car.
“To police headquarters,” he replied, “to ask them to help us find your friends.”
CHAPTER 4
From the mysterious wastes which lie far out on the ocean, the fog was again creeping stealthily across the bay and into the throbbing arteries of the great city. Through half-opened doors and windows it rolled like smoke, and piled like drifted snow against the mountains of brick and stone. Caught for a moment on a transient breeze, it swirled around a towering pile on lower Broadway, and eddied up to the windows of the Ketchim Realty Company, where it sifted through the chinks in the loose frames and settled like a pall over the dingy rooms within.
To Philip O. Ketchim, junior member of the firm, it seemed a fitting external expression of the heavy gloom within his soul. Crumpled into the chair at the broad table in his private office, with his long, thin legs stretched out before him, his hands crammed into the pockets of his trousers, and his bullet-shaped head sunk on his flat chest, until it seemed as if the hooked nose which graced his hawk-like visage must be penetrating his breast-bone, the man was the embodiment of utter dejection. On the littered table, where he had just tossed it, lay the report of Reed and Harris on the pseudo-mineral properties of the Molino Company––the “near-mines” in the rocky cañon of the far-off Boque. Near it lay the current number of a Presbyterian review, wherein the merits of this now moribund project were advertised in terms whose glitter had attracted swarms of eager, trusting investors.
The firm name of Ketchim Realty Company was something of a misnomer. The company itself was an experiment, whose end had not justified its inception. It had been launched a few years previously by Douglass Ketchim to provide business careers for his two sons, James and Philip. The old gentleman, still hale and vigorous, was one of those sturdy Englishmen who had caught the infection of ’49 and abruptly severed the ties which bound them to their Kentish homes for the allurements of the newly discovered El Dorado of western America. Across the death-haunted Isthmus of Panamá and up the inhospitable Pacific coast the indomitable spirit of the young adventurer drove him, until he reached the golden sands of California. There he toiled for many years, until Fortune at 31 length smiled upon his quenchless efforts. Then he tossed aside his rough tools and set out for the less constricted fields of the East.
He invested his money wisely, and in the course of years turned it several times. He became a banker. He aspired to the hand of a sister of a railway president, and won it. He educated his sons in the best colleges of the East, and then sent them to Europe on their honeymoons. And finally, when the burden of years began to press noticeably, and the game became less attractive, he retired from the field of business, cleared off his indebtedness, organized the Ketchim Realty Company, put its affairs on the best possible basis, and then committed the unpardonable folly of turning it over to the unrestricted management of his two sons.