At the porte-cochère Gladys and Patsie came rushing out with frightened faces. Fred had caught the last train home after a call from New York. Bojo, with a sinking feeling, seized the note he had left for him.
Roscy telephoned. There's a rumor that a group have been cornering Pittsburgh & New Orleans all this while. If so there'll be the devil to pay in the morning. Forshay's been wild to get you. Get back somehow. If in time get the Harlem 6:42 at Jenkinstown. In haste.
"Can I make the 6:42 at Jenkinstown?" he cried to the groom.
"I'm so frightened! Telephone at once!" He heard Doris cry, and, hardly heeding her he looked about vacantly. Then something was pressed in his hand, and Patsie's voice was sounding in his ears. "Here's your bag. I packed it. Keep up your courage, Bojo!"
"Patsie, you're a dear. Thank you. All right now!" He took her hands, met her clear brave eyes, and sprang into the sleigh. A terrible sickening dread came over him, an unreasoning superstitious dread. He felt ruin and worse, cold and damp in the air about him, ruin inevitable from the first, the bubble's collapse as he waved a hasty farewell and shot away in the race across the night.
"What has happened?" he asked himself a hundred times during the headlong drive. A corner in Pittsburgh & New Orleans--that was possible but hardly probable. But if a corner had taken place it meant ruin, absolute ruin--and worse. The thought was too appalling to be seized at once. He reassured himself with specious explanations. There might be a flurry; Gunther and his crowd, who were in control of the system, might have attempted a division to support their property; but the final attack at which Joseph Skelly had hinted more than once as timed for the coming week, the throwing on the market of 100,000 shares--200,000 if necessary--must overwhelm this support, must overwhelm it. What was terrible, though, was the unknown--to be hours from New York, cut off from communication, and not to know what was this shapeless dread.
When they swung into Jenkinstown, orange lights from the windows cut up the snowbound streets in checkerboard patterns of light and shade: an organ was beginning in mournful bass from a shanty church; a cheap phonograph in a flickering ice-cream parlor was grinding out a ragged march. Through the windows, heavy parties still at the Sunday newspapers were gathered under swinging lamps. The cutter drew up by the hovel of a station and departed, leaving him alone in the semi-darkness, a prey to his thoughts. A group returning after a day's visit trudged past him, laughing uproariously, Slavic and brutish in type, the women in imitated finery, gazing at him in insolent curiosity. He began to walk to escape the dismal sense of unlovely existence they brought him. Beyond were the mathematical rows of barracks--other brutish lives, the bleak ice-cream parlor, the melancholy of the evening service. It was all so one-sided, obsessed by the one idea of labor, lacking in the simplest direction toward any comprehension of the enjoyment of life.