At the offices it was as though the dead man were lying in wait. A sense of fright possessed him with the opening of the door. The girl at the telephone greeted him with swollen eyes, swollen with hysterical weeping; the stenographers moved noiselessly, hushed by the indefinable sense of the supernatural. The brass plate on the door—W. O. Forshay—seemed to him something inexpressibly grim and horrible. He had the feeling which the others showed in their roving glances, as though that plate hid something, as though there was something behind his door, waiting.
He went into the inner offices, at a sudden summons. Hauk was at the table, gazing out of the window; Flaspoller worrying and fussing in the center of the rug, switching aimlessly back and forth.
Bojo nodded silently on entering.
"You saw?" said Hauk with a jerk of his head.
"Yes. Horrible!"
Flaspoller broke out: "Not a cent in the world. God knows how much the firm will have to make good. Thirty-five, forty, forty-five thousand, maybe more. Oh, we're stuck all right."
"Do you mean to say," said Bojo slowly, "that he left nothing—no property?"
"Oh, a house perhaps—mortgaged, of course; and then do we know what else he owes? No. A hell of a hole we've got in with your Pittsburgh & New Orleans."
"That's not quite fair," said Bojo quietly. "I did give you a tip on Indiana Smelter and you made money on that. I never said anything about Pittsburgh & New Orleans. I distinctly refused to. You drew your own conclusions."
"That's a good joke," said Flaspoller with a contemptuous laugh.