"That's the limit of gameness," he observed.
But he was mistaken. It was not gameness. Wallingford was merely dazed. He could find no words to express the bitter depth to which he had fallen. As he passed out through the ticker-room he glanced at the blackboard. The boy was just chalking up the latest morning quotation on September wheat—a dollar twelve.
In the cab he opened his pocketbook and counted the money in it. Before he had started on this trip he had scarcely thought of money, except that at Fox & Fleecer's there would be waiting for him a cool, clean million. Instead of that he found himself with exactly fifty-four dollars.
Mrs. Wallingford was in her room, pale to the lips.
"How much money have you?" he asked her.
Without a word she handed him her purse. A few small bills were in it. She handed him another small black leather case which he took slowly. He opened it, and from the velvet depths there gleamed up at him the old standby—her diamonds. He could get a couple of thousand dollars on these at any time. He put the case in his pocket, but without any gleam of satisfaction, and sat down heavily in one of the huge leather-padded chairs.
"Fanny," said he savagely, "never preach to me again! I have tried a straight-out legitimate deal and it dumped me. Hereafter, be satisfied with whatever way I make money, just so long as I have the law on my side. Why," and his indignation over this last reflection was beyond expression, "I've coaxed a carload of money out of the farmers of this country, and I don't get away with a cent of it! A thief got it! A thief and a grafter!"
Mrs. Wallingford did not answer him. She was crying. It was not so much that they had lost all of this money, it was not that he had spoken harshly to her for almost the first time since he had come into her life, but the shattering once more of certain hopeful dreams that had grown up within her since their sojourn in Battlesburg. Of course, he was instantly regretful and made such clumsy amends as he could, but the sting, not of bitterness but of sorrow, was there, and it remained for long after; until, in fact, she came to realize how much to heart her husband had taken his only real defeat. For the first time in his life he became despondent. The height to which he had aspired and had almost reached, looked now so utterly unattainable that the contemplation of it took out of him all ambition, all initiative, all life. He seemed to have lost his creative faculty. Where his fertile brain had heretofore teemed with plans and projects, crowding upon each other, clamoring for fulfilment, now he seemed incapable of thought, and fell into an apathy from which he could not arouse himself no matter how hard he tried. Parting company with Blackie Daw, who seemed equally rudderless, they moved aimlessly about from city to city, pawning Mrs. Wallingford's diamonds as they needed the money, but the man's spirit was gone, and no matter how often he changed his environment or brought himself into contact with new fields and new opportunities, no plan for getting back upon his feet seemed to offer itself. He was too much disheartened, in fact, even to try. To husband their fast waning resources they even descended to living in boarding houses, where the brief gratification of exciting awe among the less impressive boarders was but small compensation for the loss of the luxury to which they had been used.
It was the sight of a miserable dinner in one of these boarding houses that proved the turning point for him. His chair was drawn back from the table for him when he suddenly shoved it to its place again, and with a darkening brow stalked out of the dining room, followed by the bewildered Mrs. Wallingford.
"I can't stand this thing, Fanny," he declared. "I've insulted my stomach with that sort of fodder until it's too late for an apology."