He turned on the clerk beside him with the savage and melodramatic gesture of an irritated musical comedy star, and the boy recoiled before him.
"That's all. You can go home," he said curtly.
Two minutes later he was left alone in the silent office.
At the best of times there was in the nature of Mr. Edward Eggleston Murch not overmuch genuine urbanity. Urbanity of the surface he had, of course; he called on it at need in very much the same way that he called on his stenographer. But of true courtesy or consideration Mr. Murch's makeup was singularly and flawlessly free. On the contrary he could, on occasion, summon to his face a congealment and to his eye a steely gleam which nobody admired but which all respected. Ordinarily this was either for his inferiors, or for those unfortunates who had come to cross purposes with him, or for those who had made blunders costly to him that his most glacial manner was reserved; but every one about the Salamander office knew of it, either by hearsay or by actual experience. Mr. O'Connor was removed from all danger of running counter to the Salamander's leading stockholder, so long as the company continued to make money. But what might now happen, Mr. O'Connor did not care to consider—and yet the topic engrossed his attention so deeply that darkness surprised him still adrift on the waters of this sea of doubt.
Not until the swift winter nightfall recalled him to himself did he remember the world around him; and when at last he groped his way down the long flights of dusky stairs to the street, his was the slow and inelastic step of a beaten man.
Mr. Murch had spent the holiday and the week-end at the country place of a fellow financier. To this retired spot news penetrated with decorum and conservatism. One was in no danger, at Holmdale, of acting on premature information, for all information which reached this sequestered Westchester chateau did so in the most leisurely and placid manner. For this very reason Mr. Murch shunned Holmdale and resorted to many a subterfuge to avoid the acceptance of divers invitations to sojourn beneath the medieval roof of its host, who happened to be a man whom even Mr. Murch hesitated to offend. In the present case, when on returning to New York early Monday morning he learned that one of the most terrible losses in fire insurance annals had occurred without his knowledge, it did not tend to sweeten his temper.
He did not go to his own office, but with a grim face started directly for the building of the Salamander. Once within its portals he immediately entered Mr. O'Connor's room. Mr. O'Connor was seated at his desk, with a pile of daily reports before him.
"How much do we lose in Boston?" the visitor demanded.
The President of the Salamander had been in the building during most of the past twenty-four hours, taking off the lines in the burned district on a special bordereau. Neither the Osgood office nor his special agent could be reached on the long distance telephone; and the newspaper accounts, even thus long after the fire, were still painfully vague and somewhat rhetorically hysterical. They talked much of the "devouring element," and the word "lurid" frequently occurred; but no reporter had been sufficiently practical to bound the burned district or to state specifically what buildings had or had not been spared. Still, they told enough. To the meanest intelligence it was patent that a tremendous catastrophe had taken place, that most of the section from School Street south to the railroad was leveled, and virtually everything therein was totally destroyed—except the fireproof buildings, which were still standing, scorched and shaken, stripped clean of combustible contents, but not fatally damaged.
O'Connor had the list in his hand. In his heart now was the calm absence of feeling which marks the man who has abandoned hope.