"Yes; my wife could come to my assistance. I have been forced to ask her. She won't. I have been living in a fool's paradise. That's what hurts!"
CHAPTER XXVII
PATSIE'S SCHEME
When Bojo returned home after a brief stolen interview with Patsie, he could hardly believe what he had himself witnessed. It seemed incredible that all that magnificence and luxury might be dissipated in a night, could depend upon the wavering of an hour in a mad exchange. But deeper than the feeling of impending disaster—which he even now could not realize—was the disclosure of the true state of affairs in the Drake household. Without telling Patsie the extent of her father's danger, he had told of Drake's applying to his wife for assistance and her refusal. Then Patsie brokenly had told her part, how she had pled with her mother and sought in vain to place before her the true seriousness of the situation, her father's peril and his instant need. To entreaties and remonstrances Mrs. Drake remained deaf, sheltering herself behind an invariable answer. Why should she throw good money after bad? What was to be gained by it? If he had thrown away the family fortune, all the more reason for her to save what she had. The worst was that Dolly was abroad and Doris and her husband were cruising off Palm Beach and the telegram they sent might not reach them in time.
The next morning Bojo waited fitfully for the opening of the Stock Exchange, with the dreaded memories of Haggerdy's prophecies running in his head. It took him back to the days when he himself had been a part of the vast maelstrom of speculation. He breakfasted with one eye on the clock waiting for the hands to advance to the fatal hour of ten. At five minutes past that hour he went feverishly across the way to the ticker in the neighboring hotel brokerage. He had a feeling as though he were being sucked back into the old life of violent emotions and unreal theatrical upsets. He remembered the day before the drop in Pittsburgh & New Orleans when he had waited in the Hauk and Flaspoller offices matching quarters with Forshay to endure the last few intervening minutes before the crisis which was to sweep away their fortunes as a tidal wave obliterates a valley. He had not understood then the ironical laughter in Forshay's eyes, but as he came back again to the old associations he felt himself living over with a new poignant understanding the final act of that tragedy.
Between the Tom Crocker of those breathless days and the ordered self which he had built up during these last months of discipline there seemed to intervene unreal worlds.
The group gathered in the hotel branch of Pitt & Sanderson were indolently interested rather than excited. They were of the flitting and superficial gambling type, youngsters still new to the excitement of the game and old men who could not tear themselves away from their established habit. They formed quite a little coterie in which the differences of age and wealth were obliterated by the common bond of the daily hazard. He knew the type well, the reckless plunger risking thousands on shallow margins, determined to make or lose all at one killing; the rodent, sharp-eyed, close-fisted veteran, wary from many failures, who was content to play for half a point rise and take his instant profit. The lounging group studied him with a moment's curiosity, seeking in which category to place the intruder, whether among the shifting truant crowd stopping for the moment's information or among that harried occasional group of lost souls who came expectant of nothing but complete disaster.
Bojo went to the tape with almost the feeling with which a reformed drunkard closes his hand over the glass that had once been his destruction. His mind, excited by the memories of the night before, was prepared for a shock. To his surprise the clicking procession of values—Reading, Union Pacific, Amalgamated Copper, Northern Pacific—showed but fractional declines. The break he had come to witness did not develop. He waited a quarter of an hour, half an hour, an hour. The market continued weak but heavy.
"Nothing much doing," he said, turning to his neighbor, a financial rail bird of a rather horsy type, grisled and bald.