Friday, the Thirteenth | Page 7

Now, Jim, this poor girl, who, it
seems, has recently been acting as the judge's secretary, has just learned
that that coup of Reinhart and his crowd has completely ruined her
father. The decline has swamped his own fortune, and, what is worse, a
million to a million and a half of his trust funds as well, and the old
judge--well, you and I can understand his position. Yet I do not know
that you just can, either, for you do not quite understand our Virginia
life and the kind of revered position a man like Judge Sands occupies.
You would have to know that to understand fully his present purgatory
and the terrible position of this daughter, for it seems that since he
began to get into deep water he has been relying upon her for courage
and ideas. From our talk I gather she has a wonderful store of
up-to-date business notions, and I am convinced from what she lays out
that the judge's affairs are hopeless, and, Jim, when that old man goes
down it will be a smash that will shake our State in more ways than
one.
"Up to now the girl has stood up to the blow like a man and has been
able to steady the judge until he presents an exterior that holds down
suspicion as to his real financial condition, although she says Reinhart
and his Baltimore lawyer, from the ruthless way they put on the screws
to shake out his holdings in the Air Line, must have a line on it that the
judge is overboard. The old gentleman can keep things going for six
months longer without jeopardising any of the remaining trust funds, of
which he has some two millions, and while his wife, who is an invalid,
knows the judge is in some trouble, she does not suspect his real
position. His daughter says that when the blow came, that day of the
panic, when Reinhart jammed the stock out of sight and scuttled her
father's bankers and partners in the road, the Wilsons of Baltimore, she
had a frightful struggle to keep her father from going insane. She told

me that for three days and nights she kept him locked in their rooms at
their hotel in Baltimore, to prevent him from hunting Reinhart and his
lawyer Rettybone and killing them both, but that at last she got him
calmed down and together they have been planning.
"Jim, it was tough to sit there and listen to the schemes to recoup that
this old gentleman and this girl, for she is only twenty-one, have tried
to hatch up. The tears actually rolled down my cheeks as I listened; I
couldn't help it; you couldn't either, Jim. But at last out of all the plans
considered, they found only one that had a tint of hope in it, and the
serious mention of even that one, Jim, in any but present circumstances,
would make you think we were dealing with lunatics. But the girl has
succeeded in making me think it worth trying. Yes, Jim, she has, and I
have told her so, and I hope to God that that hard-headed horse-sense of
yours will not make you sit down on it."
Bob Brownley had got to his feet; he was slipping the shackles of that
fiery, romantic, Southern passion that years in college and Wall Street
had taught him to keep prisoner. His eyes were flashing sparks. His
nostrils vibrated like a deer buck's in the autumn woods. He faced me
with his hands clinched.
"Jim Randolph," he went on, "as I listened to that girl's story of the
terrible cruelty and devilish treachery practised by the human hyenas
you and I associate with, human hyenas who, when in search of dirty
dollars--the only thing they know anything about--put to shame the real
beasts of the wilds--when I listened, I tell you that I felt it would not
give me a twinge of conscience to put a ball through that slick
scoundrel Reinhart. Yes, and that hired cur of his, too, who prostitutes a
good family name and position, and an inherited ability the Almighty
intended for more honest uses than the trapping of victims on whose
purses his gutter-born master has set lecherous eyes. And, Jim, as I
listened, a troop of old friends invaded my memory--friends whom I
have not seen since before I went to Harvard, friends with whom I
spent many a happy hour in my old Virginia home, friends born of my
imagination, stalwart, rugged crusaders, who carried the sword and the
cross and the banner inscribed 'For Honour and for God.' Old friends

who would troop into my boyhood and trumpet, 'Bob, don't forget,
when you're a man, that the goal is