Therein she was right; it was a true diagnosis if ever there was one. Mr. Foxman had been suddenly and sorely stricken in the midst of health and contentment; Mr. Foxman was now seriously unwell, both physically and as to the state of his nervous system.
Indeed the gentleman was in even more deplorable case than the foregoing words would indicate. Mr. Foxman was the engineer who is hoisted by his own petard. He was the hunter who falls into the pitfall he himself has digged, who is impaled on the stake he himself has planted. He was the hangman who chokes in the noose he wove for other victims. In short, Mr. Foxman was whatever best describes, by simile and comparison, the creature which unexpectedly is wrecked and ruined by contrivances of its own devisement.
At the top of the first page of The Clarion, smeared across three columns in letters which, to Mr. Foxman’s petrified gaze, seemed cubits high, ran a certain well-remembered scare head, and under that, in two-column measure, a box of black-faced type, and under that, with its accusations bristling out from the body matter [362] like naked lance tips, followed the story which told of the proposed Pearl Street trolley grab and the proposed East Side merger steal.
All of it was there, every word of it, from the crackling first paragraph to the stinging wasp tail of the last sentence!
The telephone has played a considerable part in this recital. It is to play still one more part and then we are done with telephones.
Mr. Foxman regained the faculty of consecutive thought—presently he did. He ran to the telephone, and after a little time during which he wildly blasphemed at the delay he secured connection with the office of the firm of brokers who carried the account of Mr. X.
It was too late to save anything from the wreckage; the hour for salvaging had gone by. A clerk’s voice, over the wire, conveyed back the melancholy tidings. A bomb had burst in Wall Street that morning. The East Side merger scheme had been blown into smithereens by a sensational story appearing in The Clarion, and the fragments still were falling in a clattering shower on the floor of the stock exchange. As for Pearl Street trolley common, that had gone clear through to the basement. The last quotation on this forsaken stock had been seven and a half asked, and nothing at all offered.
The account of Mr. X, therefore, was an account no longer; it was off the books. Mr. X’s ten-point margin having been exhausted, Mr. X had been closed out, and to all intents [363] and purposes neither he nor his account any longer existed.
Mr. Foxman’s indisposition increased in the intensity of its visible symptoms until the alarmed maid, standing helplessly by, decided that Mr. Foxman was about to have a stroke of some sort. As a matter of fact he had already had it—two strokes really, both of them severe ones.
We go back a little now—to the evening before. We go back to the alcoholic Hemburg, trying to make good in his ad-interim eminence as acting make-up editor and, in pursuance of this ambition, riding for the time being upon the water wagon, with every personal intention of continuing so to ride during all time to come.