“Wall Street has lived through many black Fridays.  Some of them have been thirteenth-of-the-month Fridays, but no Friday yet marked from the calendar, no Saturday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday yet garnered to the storehouse of the past was ever more jubilantly welcomed by his Satanic Majesty than yesterday.  We pray heaven no coming day may be ordained to go against yesterday’s record for tigerish cruelty and awful destruction.  It is rumoured that Mr. Brownley of Randolph & Randolph, either for himself or his clients cleared twenty-five millions of profit.  We believe that this estimate is low.  The losses coming through Robert Brownley’s terrible onslaught must have run over five hundred millions.  Wall Street and the country will do well to take the moral of yesterday’s market to their heart.  It is this:  The concentration of wealth in the hands of a few Americans is a menace to our financial structure.  It is the unanimous opinion of ‘the Street’ that Robert Brownley could never have succeeded in battering down the price of Sugar in the very teeth of the Camemeyer and Standard Oil support as he did yesterday, without a cash backing of from fifty to one hundred millions.  If a vast aggregation of money owners deliberately place themselves behind an onslaught such as was so successfully made yesterday, why can that slaughter not be repeated at any time, on any stock, and against the support of any backing?”

When I read this and listened to talk along the same lines, I was puzzled.  I could not for the life of me see where Bob Brownley could have got five to ten millions’ backing for such a raid, much less fifty to a hundred.  Yet I was forced to confess that he must have had some tremendous backing; else how could he have done what I had seen him do?

Bob left his wife at his mother’s house while he went to Sands Landing to the funeral.  After the old judge and his victims had been laid away and the relatives had gathered in the library of the great white Sands mansion, he explained their kinswoman’s condition and told them that she was his wife.  He insisted upon paying all Judge Sands’s debts, over $500,000 of which was owed to members of the Sands family for whom he had been trustee.  Before he went back to his mother’s, Bob had turned a great calamity into an occasion for something near rejoicing.  Judge Sands and his family were very dear to the people of the section, but his misfortune had threatened such wide-spread ruin that the unlooked-for recovery of a million and a half was a godsend that made for happiness.

Two days after the funeral Bob’s dearest hope fled.  He had ordered all things at the Sands plantation put in their every-day condition.  Beulah Sands’s uncles, aunts, and cousins had arranged to welcome her and to try by every means in their power to coax back her lost mind.  They assured Bob that, barring the absence of Beulah’s father, mother, and sister, there would not be a memory-recaller