"You're right! ... He had something on his mind. Said he wanted to talk to me. So I went up to his rooms afterward. There he blurted out that he was long on Union Central. The stock had broken thirteen points that day. He was seventy-five thousand in the hole. Hadn't a sou, he said. Evidently he'd been bucking the market for some time. Well, that was bad enough, but he actually had the cheek to suggest that I take the debt on my shoulders. I was young, he said, I could live it down, whereas it would ruin him. In the end it came out that he had already entered the transactions in my name in our private ledger, knowing that I never looked in the book. That made me see red. Such treachery! I blew up. I withdrew from the firm on the spot. Told him he could have my twenty-five thousand until he was on his feet, and he could borrow the rest from his wealthy friends."
"What did you do next?" asked Pen.
"I was so blazing mad I scarcely knew what I was doing. My one idea was to get shut of the whole boiling. Rotten game the Street; I was fed up with it anyhow. This only capped the climax. I longed for something clean like paddling a canoe in open water. My canoe was up at a boat-house on Spuyten Duyvil creek. I flung a few things into a valise and went right up there and got it. I paddled right through the rest of the night; down to Perth Amboy and up the Raritan river. By morning I was cooled off. You see I'd no reason to worry about the firm. Dongan had plenty of wealthy friends. If he'd lived he could have raised the money."
"How did your revolver get away from you?"
"Oh! ... I don't know. While I was packing I noticed it wasn't there, but I was too much excited to think about it."
"Had Mr. Dongan any enemies?"
"No. How should he have? A man like that. Never did a positive act in his life, either good or bad."
"A love-affair maybe?"
Don shook his head with a smile. "Not Dongan's line at all. He had no luck with the sex."
"Who were his friends?"