Chapter IV.

The following week Bob returned to the office.  He had not changed, and yet he had changed greatly.  Rest had apparently done much for him.  His colour was good, his step elastic as of old, and his head was thrown back as if he were buckled up for the fray and wanted all to know it.  Yet there was something in the eye, in the setness of the jaw, in the hair-trigger calm, yet fiercely savage grip in which he closed his strong hands on the arms of his chair, that told me more plainly than words that this was not the optimistic, soft-hearted Bob Brownley I had known and loved.  I could not help feeling that if I had been a leader of the Russian terrorists, and this man who now sat before me had come to my ken when I was selecting bomb-throwers, I should have seized upon him of all men as the one to stalk the Czar or his marked minions.  Surely the iron that had entered Bob’s soul a week before had affected his whole being.  I think Beulah Sands had some such thoughts.  For I saw a shadow of perplexity cross her broad, low forehead after her first meeting with him, a shadow that had not been there before.

For days after Bob’s return I saw little of him.  I think Beulah Sands saw less.  During Stock Exchange hours he spent most of his time on the floor, but he executed few of our orders.  He merely looked them over and handed them out to his assistants.  As far as I could learn, he spent much of his time there yesterdaying through hope’s graveyards, a not uncommon pastime for active Exchange members whose first through specials have been open-switched by the “System” towerman.  So strong had become this habit of going about from pole to pole with bent head and a far-off gaze that his fellow members began to humour and respect it.  They all knew that Bob had gone up against the Sugar panic hard.  No one knew how hard, but all guessed from his changed appearance and habits that it must have been a bone-smashing blow.  Nothing so quickly and so deeply stirs a Stock Exchange man’s feelings for his brother member as to know that “They” have ditched his El Dorado flyer—­that is, if he has been a good the books showed no change in Beulah Sands’s account.  There was the poor little $30,000 balance; no other entries.  One afternoon Beulah Sands had asked for a meeting between Bob and myself in her office.  She could hardly have asked Bob to come without me, but I knew it was Bob she wanted to see, and I felt that the best thing I could do for them was to leave them alone.  So I made some excuse for a moment’s delay at my desk, telling Bob to go on into her office, and promising to follow shortly.  He went in, leaving the door partly open.  I think that from the moment he entered the room both of them utterly forgot my existence.  From her desk Beulah could not see me, and Bob sat so that his back was half toward me.  “I dislike to trouble you about my account,” I heard her begin in a voice a trifle uneven, “but