With a laugh of joy she followed him to the closet where hung the little gray turban and the pretty gray jacket. He took them from their peg and gave them to her.
“Not a word, Jim,” he bade me. “In the name of God and all our friendship, not a word. Beulah Sands will be my wife as soon as I can find a minister to marry us. It is best, best. It is right. It is as God would have it, or I am not capable of knowing right from wrong. Anyway, it is what will be. She has no father, no mother, no sister, no one to protect and shield her. The ‘System’ has robbed her of all in life, even of herself, of everything, Jim, but me. I must try to win her back for herself, or to make her new world a happy one—a happy one for her.”
Chapter VII.
An old gambler, whose life had been spent listening to the rattle of the drop-in-bound-out little roulette ball, was told by a fellow victim, as his last dollar went to the relentless tiger’s maw, that the keeper’s foot was upon an electric button which enabled him to make the ball drop where his stake was not. He simply said, “Thank God. I thought that prince of cheats, Fate, who all through life has had his foot on the button of my game, was the one who did the trick.” Long suffering had driven the old gambler to the loser’s bible, Philosophy! Cheated by man’s device, he knew he had some chance of getting even; but Fate he could not combat.
Bob Brownley had thought himself in hard luck when his eyes opened to the fact that he had been robbed by means of dice loaded by man, but when Fate pressed the button he saw that his man-made hell was but a feeble imitation, and—was satisfied, as whoever knows the game of life is satisfied, because—he must be. Bob’s strong head bowed, his iron will bent, and meekly his soul murmured, “Thy will be done.”
That night he married Beulah Sands. The minister who united the grown-up man and the woman who was as a new-born babe saw nothing extraordinary in the match. He murmured to me, who acted as best man to the groom, maid of honour to the bride, and father and mother to both, “We see strange sights, we ministers of the great city, Mr. Randolph. The sweet little lady appears to be a trifle scared.” My explanation that she and Mr. Brownley were the only survivors of the awful tragedies of the day was sufficient. He was satisfied when he got no other response to his question, “Do you take this man to be your wedded husband?” than a sweet childish smile as she snuggled closer to Bob.
Bob and his bride went South to his mother and sisters the next day. He left to me the settlement of his trades. He instructed me to set aside $3,000,000 profits for Beulah Sands-Brownley, and insisted that I pay from the balance the notes he had given me a few weeks before. There remained something over $5,000,000 for himself.
The leading Wall Street paper, in its preachment on the panic, wound up with:
“Wall Street has lived through many black Fridays. Some of them have been thirteenth-of-the-month Fridays, but no Friday yet marked from the calendar, no Saturday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday yet garnered to the storehouse of the past was ever more jubilantly welcomed by his Satanic Majesty than yesterday. We pray heaven no coming day may be ordained to go against yesterday’s record for tigerish cruelty and awful destruction. It is rumoured that Mr. Brownley of Randolph & Randolph, either for himself or his clients cleared twenty-five millions of profit. We believe that this estimate is low. The losses coming through Robert Brownley’s terrible onslaught must have run over five hundred millions. Wall Street and the country will do well to take the moral of yesterday’s market to their heart. It is this: The concentration of wealth in the hands of a few Americans is a menace to our financial structure. It is the unanimous opinion of ‘the Street’ that Robert Brownley could never have succeeded in battering down the price of Sugar in the very teeth of the Camemeyer and Standard Oil support as he did yesterday, without a cash backing of from fifty to one hundred millions. If a vast aggregation of money owners deliberately place themselves behind an onslaught such as was so successfully made yesterday, why can that slaughter not be repeated at any time, on any stock, and against the support of any backing?”
When I read this and listened to talk along the same lines, I was puzzled. I could not for the life of me see where Bob Brownley could have got five to ten millions’ backing for such a raid, much less fifty to a hundred. Yet I was forced to confess that he must have had some tremendous backing; else how could he have done what I had seen him do?