Bowen slammed the receiver on the hook. “Oh, hell!” he said simply. “Well, we’ll face the music!”
IX—FEMININE INSTINCT.
Bob Bowen sat in the private office of Gus Saunders at three fifteen. On the way down-town he had stopped at a doctor’s office and had had his head bound up. As he himself put it, a couple of days would see him able to butt into another wall.
“And I’ve sure butted it this time,” he said with assumed cheerfulness, as he concluded his story. In the eyes of Alice Ferguson he read quick sympathy—sympathy, and something else that set his pulses to leaping. But he refused to meet her eyes.
“I sure have,” he went on. “Where I made my mistake was in thinking that Henderson was—was—well, that he was something less than Henderson! My one consolation is that I knocked him out so effectually that he never got word to the unknown Charley to sell out. When the news of the real condition of the Apex Crown got abroad, and the market busted all to nothing, Henderson was still rocked in the cradle of the deep. It makes me feel better to think that that skunk went down with us!
“But I’m only sorry for—for your sake, Miss Ferguson. I’m not worrying about my own money; but yours—”
“Mine is safe,” said the girl, gazing at him with shining eyes.
Bowen sat up a trifle straighter. “What?”
“I have a confession to make, Mr. Bowen—a happy confession,” said the girl, earnestly, leaning forward. “Mr. Saunders had been trying to get in touch with you all morning and had failed. No one knew where you were. At noon I came down here and got reports. Then the stock began to go up and up. It reached ninety, and was still climbing!
“To tell you the truth, I was afraid. Why? I can’t say, except that it was just a feeling inside of me. There was no word from you; all sorts of rumors were flying around about Apex Crown, and—and Mr. Saunders said that the stock was being so rottenly manipulated that there might be an investigation! That frightened me more than anything. So I told Mr. Saunders to sell the whole thing—”