Tom Halstead, however, gazed after the nervous financier with a new, deeper feeling of respect.
“I don’t understand very much about this Wall Street game, and my head is lined with a maze of figures,” the young skipper muttered to himself. “But there’s a heap of the man in you, Moddridge. When you might have saved a very decent fortune to yourself, you threw it into the whirlpool to try to protect your absent friend. Yon may be a nervous wreck, but hang me if you aren’t a whole lot of a man at bottom!”
CHAPTER XV
THE MASTHEAD GAME
WHILE the game that frenzied men were playing in Wall Street had been hurrying Mr. Delavan and Mr. Moddridge into a ruin that would drag scores of others into the crash, Engineer Joe Dawson had been going ahead very methodically under his young captain’s orders.
The “Rocket’s” gasoline tank had been filled. In addition, as many extra cases of the oil had been taken aboard and stored as the boat’s space below could provide for.
“But be mighty careful what you do, Hank, with the galley fire,” urged the young skipper, seriously. “Any blaze that starts aboard this boat when we’re out on the water is pretty sure to blow us a thousand miles past Kingdom Come.”
Just after dark, on the night of that day when Eben Moddridge threw his last dollars into the frantic game of speculation, Tom was summoned in haste from the boat to the cigar store near the pier. There was a telephone booth there, and the young skipper was wanted at the ’phone.
“This is Theodore Dyer,” announced the speaker at the other end.