Ruin and disaster--and worse, for not alone money losses and huge flaring head-lines followed closely on the heels of the Gordon Panic. In Saturday's paper one read of a woman, crazed by her losses, found dead beneath the window of her third-story room, and in the early calm of the Sabbath morning little Mott-Smith, at last tired of following the advice of others, for once acted on his own initiative, and the attendants at the Federal, bursting in the door, found him lying across the bed, the smoke still curling faintly upward from the pistol in his hand, a little round hole drilled neatly between his eyes.
And then, at last, after all the damage had been done, Monday morning saw the clearing of the storm. The newspapers which had talked hopelessly of panic, acting on "information from the very highest sources," suddenly changed their tone. "A bear drive," "A carefully planned raid," "Gunning for Gordon," were some of the phrases used. Stocks rallied, went blithely up, held their gain and then increased it, and closed actually buoyant. It was over. "They" had "gone" for Gordon, and had "got" him. That was all. The incident was closed.
During Saturday and Sunday Gordon received three visitors at his home. The first was a man whose eyesight evidently troubled him very considerably, for he came to Gordon's door in a closed carriage, with the shades drawn; did not emerge until such time as there chanced to be no passers-by in sight; and hastened up the steps with his hand held close to his face, as if further to aid the disfiguring blue goggles that protected him from the sun. It was two o'clock when he arrived, and he remained until shortly before six, when the same carriage again drew up at the door.
Once safely ensconced behind the drawn shades, he thoughtfully removed the blue goggles, and sat silent and preoccupied, until the carriage paused before the most magnificent house on the wholly magnificent avenue, the famous residence of the famous head of the Combine. Just once during the drive did the man with the weak eyes allow himself a thought outside his mission; very slowly he shook his head, and half aloud began to frame a brief sentence, "Of all the damned, cold-blooded--" and there he stopped, for the head of the Combine desired reports, and not comments, even from the man who was, perhaps, in his way, the most trusted little cog in the whole vast machinery of the big Trust's many activities. And so the sentence remained unfinished.