“Going?  Not yet.”

She read hastily what she had overheard.

“Devil take Worthington,” ground out Brainard, gripping the arms of his chair.  “For weeks I have suspected him.  They have been too clever for me.  Constance, while I have been going around laying myself open to discovery, Sybil has played a cool and careful game.”

He was pacing the floor.

“So—­that’s the plan.  Hold back, keep the stock up until they get started.  Then let it go down until I’m forced to sell out at a loss, buy it back cheap, and control the reorganization.  Well, I haven’t control now, alone.  I wish I did have.  But neither have they.  The public owns the stock now.  I need it.  Who’ll get it first—­that’s the question!”

He was thinking rapidly.

“If you could do a little bear manipulation yourself,” she suggested.  “That might get the public scared.  You could get enough to control, perhaps, then.  They wouldn’t dare sell—­or if they did they would weaken their own control.  Either way, you get them, going or coming.”

“Exactly what I was thinking.  Play their own game—­ahead of them—­ accelerate it.”

It was just after the lunch hour that Constance resumed her place at her desk with the receiver at her ear.

There were voices again in the board room.

“My God, Sheppard, what do you think?  Someone is selling Motors—­ five points off and still going down.”

“Who is it?  What shall we do?”

“Who!  Brainard, of course.  Some one has peached.  What are you going to do?”

“Wait.  Let’s call up the News Agency.  Hello—­yes—­what?  Unofficial rumor of prosecution of Motors by the government—­large selling orders placed in advance.  The deuce—­say, we’ll have to meet this or—­”

“Meet nothing.  It’s Brainard.  He’s going down in a big crash.  We pour our money into his pockets now and let him sell at the top and grab back control with our money?  Not much.  I sell, too.”

Already boys were on the street with extras crying the great crash in Motors.  It was only a matter of minutes before all the news reading public were thoroughly scared at the apparently bursting bubble.  Shares were dug up in small lots, in huge blocks and slammed on the market for what they would bring.  All day the pounding went on.  Thousands of shares were poured out until Motors which had been climbing toward par in the neighborhood of 79 had declined forty points.  Brainard had jumped in first and had realized the top price for his holdings.

Yet during all the wild scenes when the telephone was ringing insistently for him, Brainard, having set the machinery in motion and having been ostentatiously in the office when it started in order to avert suspicion, could not now be found.

The market had closed and Constance was reading the account of the collapse as it was interpreted in the Wall Street editions of the papers, when the door opened and Brainard entered.