"Well, remember for a minute. I"—his voice exploded—"I may see her, Bulger—before the month is over, I may see her!"
Bulger threw himself back in his chair.
"What!" he exclaimed, jumping with an affectation of surprise.
It was as though the sudden motion, the exclamation had touched a spring in the mind of Norcross, had projected his spirit from that disintegrating, anaemic cell in his brain to the sound, full-blooded cells by which he did his daily business. His form, which had seemed relaxed and old, stiffened visibly. He turned his eyes on Bulger.
"Forget that, too," he said. "Some day, when I'm strong enough, you'll go with me and you'll believe too." And now the secretary had signalled the chauffeur, and Norcross had risen to go.
The streams of destiny were converging that afternoon; the lines were drawing close together. Among the towers of Lower Manhattan, Norcross sat baring his soul; on a bench in Stuyvesant Square, Rosalie Le Grange had reported the consummation of her investigations to Dr. Walter Huntington Blake; in a back parlor of the Upper West Side, Paula Markham, with many a sidelong glance at the approaches, sat memorizing the last syllable of a set of notes on yellow legal cap paper. But the master current was flowing elsewhere. In the offices of the Evening Sun, the stereotypers had just shot the front page of the Wall Street edition down to the clanking basement. It carried a "beat"; and that item of news had as much to do with this story as with the ultimate destinies of the L.D. and M. railroad. On October 19, two weeks hence, the directors of the road were to meet and decide whether to pay or pass the dividend. "The directors"—that, as the Sun insinuated, meant none other than Norcross. Holding a majority of the L.D. and M. stock, holding the will of those directors, his creatures, he alone would decide whether to declare the dividend or to pass it. The stock wavered at about fifty, waiting the decision. If Norcross put it on a dividend-paying basis, it was good for eighty. To know which way he would decide, to extract any information from that inscrutable mind—that were to open a steel vault with a pen-knife. "All trading," the Sun assured its readers, "will be speculative; it is considered a pure gamble."
As Bulger parted with Norcross on the street and turned south, a newsboy thrust the Wall Street Sun into his face. The announcement of the L.D. and M. situation jumped out at him from a headline. The inside information, held for two weeks by the group of speculators in which Bulger moved, was out; the public was admitted to the transaction; now was the time, if ever, to strike. He found a sound-proof telephone, and did a few minutes of rapid talking. Then he proceeded to his office.
The force was gone. Alone at his desk, he went over the papers in a complicated calculation which he had made twenty times before. By all devices, Watson could hold back the collapse of the Mongolia Mine until after October 19. By straining his credit to the utmost—liquidating everything—he himself could raise a trifle more than seventy thousand dollars. He hesitated no longer. Methodically, he apportioned out the seventy thousand dollars among a dozen brokers, who to-morrow should buy for him, on a ten point margin, L.D. and M. stock at fifty to fifty-three.
This done, Bulger locked up the papers again, telephoned for a cab, and proceeded to his club, where he dined with his customary hilarity and good humor.