“I beg you to be quiet a moment and listen to me,” he said. “I can do nothing for any of you to-night, and, what is more, I will not do anything to-night. It is impossible for me to deal with you in such an unexpected fashion as this, in such numbers. I have not gone into bankruptcy; no meeting of my creditors had been called. I have and you have no legal representative here. Now I am going, and I advise you all to do likewise. I beg you to excuse me. I know you all, I know the amount of my indebtedness to you all, and I promise you all, if I live, the very last dollar I owe you shall be paid. You must, however, give me a little time, or nobody will get anything. I will communicate with you all later on. Nobody shall lose anything, I say. Now you must excuse me.”
“Look at him; he's sick,” whispered the pretty stenographer to the other, whose soft, little sob of response alone broke the hush as Carroll went out with his sister at his side. Their shadows moved across the room as they ascended the stairs in the hall. The creditors, left alone, regarded one another in a hesitating fashion. The two women, Minna Eddy and Estella Griggs, remained quiet. Presently the two butchers and the dry-goods merchant, standing about the Oriental rug, quite a fine Bokhara, resumed their whispered colloquy regarding it, then they went out. Lee began talking to the druggist and the postmaster, with Willie Eddy at his elbow listening eagerly.
“Carroll's sick,” said Lee, with a curious effect of partisanship towards himself, as well as Carroll. “He's sick, and it is too bad. His nerves are a wreck.”
“Well, our nerves are becoming wrecks,” the postmaster rejoined, dryly.
“That's so,” said the druggist, with a worried look. “I don't know but I'll have to mortgage my stock. I've lost more than I can afford in that United Fuel.”
“I don't like to own up I've been bit,” said the postmaster, “but when it comes to being sick, and nerves being wrecks, there are others with full as much reason as Carroll.”
“He'll pay up every cent,” said Lee, eagerly.
“Maybe he will pay his debts,” said the postmaster. “I am not going to say he won't. I suppose he means to. But when it comes to making things good, when he has simply led you by the nose into disastrous speculations, I don't know. Bigger men than Arthur Carroll don't do it.”
“That's so,” said Drew. “It's one thing to pay your butcher's bill in the long run, and be above stealing goods off the counter, but a man can cheat his fellow-men in a stock trade and think pretty well of himself, and other folks think well of him.”
“That's so,” said Sigsbee Ray.