CHAPTER IX
Bellingham for the twentieth time consulted his watch, and finding that it still lacked ten minutes of midnight, he rose, walked over to the window, and stood looking out into the night. In the distance he could see the bulk of the stables looming through the darkness, and near at hand the huge lone pine tree towered in silhouette against the sky; yet his mind was not fixed upon what was before him, but was reviewing once again the events of the day, events which had occurred scarcely twelve hours ago, but which seemed, in retrospect, to have taken place ages since, in the shadow of some dim and distant past.
He could see himself, a distinct and separate entity, leaving the car and hurrying toward the garage, alert, expectant, eager to find Nolan and hear what he had to say. From the same man whom he had seen before he had sought to discover if Nolan was in, and the man had nodded with a curt "Yep," but when Bellingham was half way to the elevator his informant had called him back to explain, "Say, hold on a minute; I forgot; Nolan's quit his job."
The secretary could feel again the sinking of the heart, the shock of disappointment the words had caused. "Quit?" he had repeated, and the man had replied, "Yep. He's quit. New man on the car; a Swede. He's up there if you want to see him." But Bellingham had muttered something about its being a personal matter, and still in a daze, had made his way out of the garage, perplexed and disheartened, and vainly wondering what could possibly have happened to the chauffeur.
It was not an easy problem to solve. Certainly the money he had advanced could have been no temptation to Nolan; twenty dollars was nothing compared with the keeping of a good position. And if the chauffeur's abandonment of his job had not been voluntary, of necessity it must have been involuntary; it appeared as though he must have been detected in his pursuit of his employer, and met with a summary dismissal. Yet if this were so, why could he not still have kept his appointment with the secretary. There seemed to be no satisfactory solution, yet as a practical matter none was necessary; of what importance were theories when he knew that the actual result was a complete failure of his plans to gain information through the instrumentality of Nolan. And as a result he would now be forced to act himself; no choice was left to him; whether he liked it or not, he must assume the risk.
Thus, throughout the remainder of the day, he had laid his plans, and now was decided as to his course. But the hour for action had not yet arrived; two o'clock in the morning was the time he had chosen; and thus he lighted his spirit lamp, made and drank two cups of coffee, and then, setting and muffling his alarm clock, he lay down, fully clothed, upon the bed, to gain a little rest before setting out upon his tour of exploration. But before many moments passed, he realized that the setting of the clock was a needless precaution; the strain he was under added to the stimulant he had taken made sleep an impossibility. And curiously enough his brain, which should have been intent upon the adventure before him, now cast back through the years, and as he lay there he could see, projected against the curtain of the dark, pictures long since forgotten, detached and yet connected, leading with merciless precision to the miserable predicament of his latter days.
Behind the house lay a broad expanse of meadow, gay with flowers and traversed by a brook which had its source in the hills adjoining the farm. Hither, in his boyhood, he made an almost daily pilgrimage, but not to gather the violets and the buttercups which lined its banks, or to hunt for blackbirds' nests in the swamp below. The attraction for him had been altogether different. With his jack-knife he would fashion boats from shingles, imagine them in his mind to be racing yachts, under clouds of sail, and starting them, with scrupulous fairness, amid the ripples of the stream, he would run headlong down the field, just able to keep pace with the current, and watching with breathless interest the outcome of the contest, as the tiny craft swept around promontories, skirted the shallows, and finally crossed the finish line, to be rescued with a forked stick, and carried back up the meadow to race and race again. How had he come to play this game? No one, as far as he could remember, had taught it to him; he had been only six or seven at the time, but the memory persisted, the thrill of the struggle, the eager brook and the no less eager boy--
The scene shifted. Some one had given him a game of "steeplechase," and a new world was born. As clearly as if it had lain on the bed beside him, he could see the oval of the board, the horses, bay, black, white and gray, and he himself, cheeks flushed, heart throbbing, sitting entranced hour after hour, casting the dice, and watching and recording the result of every race. Later had come his college days, with the thrill of real racing; the Futurity, the Suburban, the scramble of dainty thoroughbreds with the bright silks of their jockeys gleaming in the sun. But before this he could dimly recall his first knowledge of the stock market, when his father, forbidden for a time to use his eyes, had asked his son to read to him the quotations in the evening paper. Bellingham could remember that he had made sorry work of it, so that his father, usually the kindest of men, had lost his temper and had soundly berated him for his stupidity. Other days, too, he could remember, of alternate exaltation and depression until the afternoon when he had come home to find his mother in tears, and his father had taken him by the shoulder and said gravely, "Hugh, you must promise me one thing. Never, so long as you live, must you have anything to do with the stock market. It has been the curse and ruin of my life. It must not ruin yours, too." Boylike, he had promised, but a dozen years later, when the lure of the Street had bewitched him, he had not regarded his promise, and with the few thousands at his command, had started to make his fortune. How he had despised the men who traded in ten-share lots; "pikers," he had called them; for it had seemed to him that to deal in hundred and two hundred share lots, on a slender margin, was evidence of true gameness and grit. But this period had not lasted long; soon the ten-share lots became a necessity, and finally an impossibility, until the fatal day when he had borrowed money on a story that was two-thirds a lie, and a week later had seen a quiet, lagging market suddenly declined with incredible rapidity, leaving him hopelessly in debt, and now at the mercy of his long-suffering creditors.
So passed the pictures before his eyes, from the boy running beside the brook to the desperate, harried man. Inheritance or not, here had been the keynote of his life--the love of a contest, a race, a struggle, the thrill of the unknown gamble, the possible chance. And in other ways he had been sane and normal; as men go, a decent sort of man. A sense of injustice surged within him. Was it fair? If a good God ruled the world, why did he implant these fierce desires in the breasts of his children? Why did he change a world of joy and beauty into a hell of discontent? Why did he--
With a start, he came to himself. How long, he wondered, had he been dreaming? The flashlight showed ten minutes of two, and silencing the alarm, he rose, and in his stocking feet crept cautiously to the door of his room and out into the hall. For good or ill, his hour had come.
The 'house was absolutely still. And suddenly, oppressed with the strain of the day, unnerved by the strangeness of his errand, he seemed to himself to be moving in some fantastic nightmare, and he was seized with a panic of fear, so that he could scarcely control his impulse to return as he had come and to abandon his reckless quest. But after an instant, he managed to conquer his quivering nerves, and concentrating all his energies upon his task, he stole down the hallway like a shadow, entered the gallery, and found himself standing before the portrait through which the banker had made his unexpected exit three days before. Copying, as well as he could recall it, the posture of his employer, he pressed with his forefinger here and there upon the canvas, but without result until he reached the hilt of the pictured sword, when almost before he realized what was taking place, the portrait, as before, swung back, and the gateway of adventure lay open before him.
A hundred times, during the day, the secretary had made his plans, and thus, without losing an instant, he entered the orifice, drew his knife from his pocket, and wedging the narrow space between the portrait and the wall so that his retreat would not be closed to him, turned to examine the staircase that lay at his feet.
It was a slender spiral of steel, apparently extending downward for an indefinite distance, and so narrow that there was scarcely an inch of superfluous space on either hand. Without hesitation, Bellingham started to descend, listening from time to time and hearing nothing, until at length he reached the bottom and found himself in a low passageway, with a door at the end. The secretary's heart sank. "Locked," he thought to himself, but equally to his surprise and his delight, the knob turned in his hand, and he entered a small chamber, with a second door at the further end. This additional exit, however, was securely barred, and finding his progress cut off in that direction, Bellingham turned his attention to the room itself.
A first glance afforded him small encouragement. To open the massive safe was clearly impossible; the sideboard was empty; and the desk in the corner, though it appeared, at first sight, to be a promising hiding place, proved, on closer examination, to contain nothing. The secretary's heart sank. Evidently his hopes were vain; his dream of romance gave place to prosaic reality; and with a pang of keenest disappointment he stood ready to admit defeat. Yet since he had risked so much, he decided that before leaving he would make one final search, an investigation of the room so careful and minute that he would be certain that he had overlooked nothing.
Accordingly, he first approached the sideboard, hunting around, behind and under it, removing and replacing each drawer in turn. Yet his efforts were in vain, and when he next transferred his attentions to the desk and began a similar exploration there, he met with no better success until he had removed the last drawer of all, and then, for the first time since he had entered the chamber, he experienced a momentary thrill as the flashlight revealed a crumpled paper which had fallen between the back of the drawer and the rear wall of the desk. Inserting his arm, he brought it forth to find that it was torn, faded and yellow with age, with some words quite illegible and others missing altogether. Yet piecing it together as best he could, he made an attempt to decipher its contents, and the next moment, so intense was the shock, so overpowering the revulsion from despair to exaltation, that he found himself staggering backward as if from a blow, grasping at the table behind him to save himself from actual physical collapse. But the next moment, as his heart once more sent the blood coursing through his veins, he rallied, and without losing a second he returned the drawer to its place, glanced hastily around to make sure that he had left no traces of his visit, and then made his way as quickly as possible up the staircase, through the opening in the wall, and once more regaining his room, he locked the door, lit his reading lamp, and began a systematic study of his prize.
It took only a few moments to make him realize that the task of deciphering the document was to be one of almost insuperable difficulty, but at the same time it became increasingly evident that he had made a discovery the importance of which could scarcely be exaggerated. The paper was a plain sheet of foolscap, apparently a rough draft of a final copy,--torn into eight pieces, of which to Bellingham's chagrin it now appeared that two--the lower rectangle on the right and the third from the top on the left--were missing. In the upper right-hand corner of the paper was the date, January 1, 1882, and beneath, in the middle of the sheet was a heading of which the first word was almost wholly obliterated, but the remaining four, "of the Money Gods," were comparatively clear and distinct. Under this heading were five sub-divisions, the numerals 1, 2, 3, and 5 showing plainly at the left, while the missing 4 would evidently have been written on the first of the two pieces which were lacking. And now, patiently and with infinite effort, straining his eyes over the dull, discolored paper and the faded ink, Bellingham succeeded in bringing out a word here and there until under the first numeral he had an actual sentence, though still with gaps where the wished-for word stubbornly resisted his search. "Most men ---- fools ----blers by nature ---- easiest way ---- to ---- in stocks."
The second sentence, for some reason or other, was much more distinctly written, and in a short time the secretary had produced, "Fundamental plan; bull market, sell ---- top; depress; bear ----ket; buy at bottom; give shorts ----."
But it was the third sentence which proved to be the most startling of all. It was very brief, containing only eight words, of which part of the first and the last four were all that the secretary could read. But they were quite sufficient to make him gasp. "Communi---- ---- signals on the tape." The letters, pregnant with meaning, stared him in the face, and made his breath come quick and fast as he threw an apprehensive glance into the darkness behind him, as though dreading the wrath and vengeance of some ghost from another world.
Almost beside himself with excitement, he toiled on. But the fourth sentence, with its missing fragment, told him little, for while the words were clear enough to the eye, they conveyed no message to his brain. On the upper line were the words, "On the watch," and directly beneath them, "for these signals," but the loss of the left hand paper, and the absolute impossibility of conjecturing what other words completed the sentence, made this portion of the message apparently valueless.
Equally tantalizing was the message under the figure five. The sentence began clearly enough, "The basis will be 1/4 3/8 1/4 if ----" and then came the blank occasioned by the second missing fragment of paper; while the sentence, resumed on the left-hand portion of the document, continued, "5/8 1/2 5/8 if down. Buying and selling ----" then once more the inevitable hiatus, and finally the three words, "on a scale." And this was the end.
The secretary sat gazing straight before him, his brain in a tumult. Coincidence well nigh incredible had led to this discovery, and now left no doubt in his mind that rumors which had been current in the Street for years, but always laughed to scorn by the whole fraternity of brokers, were true, after all. And suddenly, with irresistible conviction, facts, remarks, events, never before understood, now crowded to his mind, clear as crystal in the light of his present knowledge. Signals on the tape. More than once he had heard the story, told with bated breath under pledge of strictest secrecy. But here was proof. And for him, individually, this ancient document revealed all the glories of a new world. And thus, bending once more over the paper, Bellingham toiled until the first light of the dawn crept in at the windows, and rising unsteadily from his desk, he saw staring at him from the mirror a worn and haggard face which he could scarcely recognize as his own.
