Friday, the Thirteenth | Page 2

watching five and ten millions crumbling from
price values every few minutes, I was sure this was the work of Bob
Brownley. No one else in Wall Street had the power, the nerve, and the
devilish cruelty to rip things as they had been ripped during the last
twenty minutes. The night before I had passed Bob in the theatre lobby.
I gave him close scrutiny and saw the look of which I of all men best
knew the meaning. The big brown eyes were set on space; the outer
corners of the handsome mouth were drawn hard and tense as though
weighted. As I had my wife with me it was impossible to follow him,
but when I got home I called up his house and his clubs, intending to
ask, him to run up and smoke a cigar with me, but could locate him
nowhere. I tried again in the morning without success, but when just
before noon the tape began to jump and flash and snarl, I remembered
Bob's ugly mood, and all it portended.
Fred Brownley was Bob's youngest brother, twelve years his junior. He
had been with Randolph & Randolph from the day he left college, and
for over a year had been our most trusted Stock Exchange man. Bob
Brownley, when himself, was as fond of his "baby brother," as he
called him, as his beautiful Southern mother was of both; but when the
devil had possession of Bob--and his option during the past five years
had been exercised many a time--mother and brother had to take their
place with all the rest of the world, for then Bob knew no kindred, no
friends. All the wide world was to him during those periods a jungle
peopled with savage animals and reptiles to hunt and fight and tear and
kill.

It is hardly necessary for me to explain who Randolph & Randolph are.
For more than sixty years the name has spoken for itself in every part
of the world where dollar-making machines are installed. No railroad is
financed, no great "industrial" projected, without by force of habit,
hat-in-handing a by-your-leave of Randolph & Randolph, and every
nation when entering the market for loans, knows that the favour of the
foremost American bankers is something which must be reckoned with.
I pride myself that at forty-two, at the end of the ten years I have had
the helm of Randolph & Randolph, I have done nothing to mar the
great name my father and uncle created, but something to add to its
sterling reputation for honest dealing, fearless, old-fashioned methods,
and all-round integrity. Bradstreet's and other mercantile agencies say,
in reporting Randolph & Randolph, "Worth fifty millions and upward,
credit unlimited." I can take but small praise for this, for the report was
about the same the day I left college and came to the office to "learn the
business." But, as the survivor of my great father and uncle, I can say,
my Maker as my witness, that Randolph & Randolph have never
loaned a dollar of their millions at over legal rates, 6 per cent, per
annum; have never added to their hoard by any but fair, square business
methods; and that blight of blights, frenzied finance, has yet to find a
lodging-place beneath the old black-and-gold sign that father and uncle
nailed up with their own hands over the entrance.
Nineteen years ago I was graduated from Harvard. My classmate and
chum, Bob Brownley, of Richmond, Va., was graduated with me. He
was class poet, I, yard marshal. We had been four years together at St.
Paul's previous to entering Harvard. No girl and lover were fonder than
we of each other.
My people had money, and to spare, and with it a hard-headed,
Northern horse-sense. The Brownleys were poor as church mice, but
they had the brilliant, virile blood of the old Southern oligarchy and the
romantic, "salaam-to-no-one" Dixie-land pride of before-the-war days,
when Southern prodigality and hospitality were found wherever women
were fair and men's mirrors in the bottom of their julep-glasses.
Bob's father, one of the big, white pillars of Southern aristocracy, had

gone through Congress and the Senate of his country to the tune of
"Spend and not spare," which left his widow and three younger
daughters and a small son dependent upon Bob, his eldest.
Many a warm summer's afternoon, as Bob and I paddled down the
Charles, and often on a cold, crispy night as we sat in my shooting-box
on the Cape Cod shore, had we matched up for our future. I was to have
the inside run of the great banking business of Randolph & Randolph,
and Bob was eventually to represent my father's firm on the floor of the
Stock Exchange. "I'd die in