The Money Gods

by Ellery H. Clark

The scene shifted. Some one had given him a game of "steeplechase," and a new world was born. As clearly as if it had lain on the bed beside him, he could see the oval of the board, the horses, bay, black, white and gray, and he himself, cheeks flushed, heart throbbing, sitting entranced hour after hour, casting the dice, and watching and recording the result of every race. Later had come his college days, with the thrill of real racing; the Futurity, the Suburban, the scramble of dainty thoroughbreds with the bright silks of their jockeys gleaming in the sun. But before this he could dimly recall his first knowledge of the stock market, when his father, forbidden for a time to use his eyes, had asked his son to read to him the quotations in the evening paper. Bellingham could remember that he had made sorry work of it, so that his father, usually the kindest of men, had lost his temper and had soundly berated him for his stupidity. Other days, too, he could remember, of alternate exaltation and depression until the afternoon when he had come home to find his mother in tears, and his father had taken him by the shoulder and said gravely, "Hugh, you must promise me one thing. Never, so long as you live, must you have anything to do with the stock market. It has been the curse and ruin of my life. It must not ruin yours, too." Boylike, he had promised, but a dozen years later, when the lure of the Street had bewitched him, he had not regarded his promise, and with the few thousands at his command, had started to make his fortune. How he had despised the men who traded in ten-share lots; "pikers," he had called them; for it had seemed to him that to deal in hundred and two hundred share lots, on a slender margin, was evidence of true gameness and grit. But this period had not lasted long; soon the ten-share lots became a necessity, and finally an impossibility, until the fatal day when he had borrowed money on a story that was two-thirds a lie, and a week later had seen a quiet, lagging market suddenly declined with incredible rapidity, leaving him hopelessly in debt, and now at the mercy of his long-suffering creditors.

So passed the pictures before his eyes, from the boy running beside the brook to the desperate, harried man. Inheritance or not, here had been the keynote of his life--the love of a contest, a race, a struggle, the thrill of the unknown gamble, the possible chance. And in other ways he had been sane and normal; as men go, a decent sort of man. A sense of injustice surged within him. Was it fair? If a good God ruled the world, why did he implant these fierce desires in the breasts of his children? Why did he change a world of joy and beauty into a hell of discontent? Why did he--

With a start, he came to himself. How long, he wondered, had he been dreaming? The flashlight showed ten minutes of two, and silencing the alarm, he rose, and in his stocking feet crept cautiously to the door of his room and out into the hall. For good or ill, his hour had come.

The 'house was absolutely still. And suddenly, oppressed with the strain of the day, unnerved by the strangeness of his errand, he seemed to himself to be moving in some fantastic nightmare, and he was seized with a panic of fear, so that he could scarcely control his impulse to return as he had come and to abandon his reckless quest. But after an instant, he managed to conquer his quivering nerves, and concentrating all his energies upon his task, he stole down the hallway like a shadow, entered the gallery, and found himself standing before the portrait through which the banker had made his unexpected exit three days before. Copying, as well as he could recall it, the posture of his employer, he pressed with his forefinger here and there upon the canvas, but without result until he reached the hilt of the pictured sword, when almost before he realized what was taking place, the portrait, as before, swung back, and the gateway of adventure lay open before him.

A hundred times, during the day, the secretary had made his plans, and thus, without losing an instant, he entered the orifice, drew his knife from his pocket, and wedging the narrow space between the portrait and the wall so that his retreat would not be closed to him, turned to examine the staircase that lay at his feet.

It was a slender spiral of steel, apparently extending downward for an indefinite distance, and so narrow that there was scarcely an inch of superfluous space on either hand. Without hesitation, Bellingham started to descend, listening from time to time and hearing nothing, until at length he reached the bottom and found himself in a low passageway, with a door at the end. The secretary's heart sank. "Locked," he thought to himself, but equally to his surprise and his delight, the knob turned in his hand, and he entered a small chamber, with a second door at the further end. This additional exit, however, was securely barred, and finding his progress cut off in that direction, Bellingham turned his attention to the room itself.

A first glance afforded him small encouragement. To open the massive safe was clearly impossible; the sideboard was empty; and the desk in the corner, though it appeared, at first sight, to be a promising hiding place, proved, on closer examination, to contain nothing. The secretary's heart sank. Evidently his hopes were vain; his dream of romance gave place to prosaic reality; and with a pang of keenest disappointment he stood ready to admit defeat. Yet since he had risked so much, he decided that before leaving he would make one final search, an investigation of the room so careful and minute that he would be certain that he had overlooked nothing.

Accordingly, he first approached the sideboard, hunting around, behind and under it, removing and replacing each drawer in turn. Yet his efforts were in vain, and when he next transferred his attentions to the desk and began a similar exploration there, he met with no better success until he had removed the last drawer of all, and then, for the first time since he had entered the chamber, he experienced a momentary thrill as the flashlight revealed a crumpled paper which had fallen between the back of the drawer and the rear wall of the desk. Inserting his arm, he brought it forth to find that it was torn, faded and yellow with age, with some words quite illegible and others missing altogether. Yet piecing it together as best he could, he made an attempt to decipher its contents, and the next moment, so intense was the shock, so overpowering the revulsion from despair to exaltation, that he found himself staggering backward as if from a blow, grasping at the table behind him to save himself from actual physical collapse. But the next moment, as his heart once more sent the blood coursing through his veins, he rallied, and without losing a second he returned the drawer to its place, glanced hastily around to make sure that he had left no traces of his visit, and then made his way as quickly as possible up the staircase, through the opening in the wall, and once more regaining his room, he locked the door, lit his reading lamp, and began a systematic study of his prize.

It took only a few moments to make him realize that the task of deciphering the document was to be one of almost insuperable difficulty, but at the same time it became increasingly evident that he had made a discovery the importance of which could scarcely be exaggerated. The paper was a plain sheet of foolscap, apparently a rough draft of a final copy,--torn into eight pieces, of which to Bellingham's chagrin it now appeared that two--the lower rectangle on the right and the third from the top on the left--were missing. In the upper right-hand corner of the paper was the date, January 1, 1882, and beneath, in the middle of the sheet was a heading of which the first word was almost wholly obliterated, but the remaining four, "of the Money Gods," were comparatively clear and distinct. Under this heading were five sub-divisions, the numerals 1, 2, 3, and 5 showing plainly at the left, while the missing 4 would evidently have been written on the first of the two pieces which were lacking. And now, patiently and with infinite effort, straining his eyes over the dull, discolored paper and the faded ink, Bellingham succeeded in bringing out a word here and there until under the first numeral he had an actual sentence, though still with gaps where the wished-for word stubbornly resisted his search. "Most men ---- fools ----blers by nature ---- easiest way ---- to ---- in stocks."

The second sentence, for some reason or other, was much more distinctly written, and in a short time the secretary had produced, "Fundamental plan; bull market, sell ---- top; depress; bear ----ket; buy at bottom; give shorts ----."