“Has your company been hurt, Jim?” asked his wife, fully prepared for the worst, and making up her mind to bear up bravely under it.
“Not yet,” replied Sargent, and he passed his hand over his brow. He was already making a tremendous effort to brace himself for to-morrow’s ordeal. “I escaped to-day by an accident. By some mistake the Towando Valley was mentioned as belonging to the new A.-P. combination. Of course I didn’t correct it, but by to-morrow they’ll know.”
“Mr. Allison was responsible for that statement,” Gail serenely informed her uncle. “He promised he’d take care of you.”
“Great guns!” exploded her uncle. “What did you know about this thing?”
“All of it,” smiled Gail. She had known that Allison would keep his word, but it gave her a strange sense of relief that he had done so.
Her Aunt Helen turned to her with a commanding eye; but Gail merely dimpled.
“Of course I couldn’t say anything,” went on Gail. “It was all in confidence. Isn’t it glorious, Uncle Jim!”
“You wouldn’t have thought so if you’d been down town to-day,” responded her uncle, trying again to erase from his brow the damage which had been done to his nerves. “They wanted to mob Allison! He has cut the ground from under the entire railroad business of the United States! Their stocks have deflated an aggregate of billions of dollars, and the slump is permanent! He has bankrupted a host of men, rifled the pockets of a million poor investors; he has demoralised the entire transportation commerce of the United States; and he gave no one the show of a rat in a trap!”
“Isn’t that business?” asked Gail, the red spots beginning to come into her cheeks.
“Not quite!” snapped her Uncle Jim. “Fiction has made that the universal idea, but there are decent men in business. The majority of them are, even in railroading. Most roads are organised and conducted for the sole purpose of carrying freight and passengers at a profit for the stockholders, and spectacular stock jobbing deals are the exception rather than the rule.”