“Trust me!” said the old man, and wrung his benefactor's hand.
It was indeed with a trustful eye that Thorpe watched the train draw out of the station.
THE week following the August Bank Holiday is very rarely indeed a busy or anxious time in the City. In the ordinary course of things, it serves as the easy-going prelude--with but casual and inattentive visits eastward, and with only the most careless glances through the financial papers--to the halcyon period of the real vacation. Men come to the City during this week, it is true, but their thoughts are elsewhere--on the moors, on the blue sea, on the glacier or the fiord, or the pleasant German pine forests.
To the great mass of City people; this August in question began in a normal enough fashion. To one little group of operators, however, and to the widening circle of brokers, bankers, and other men of affairs whose interests were more or less involved with those of this group, it was a season of keen perturbation. A combat of an extraordinary character was going on--a combat which threatened to develop into a massacre. Even to the operators who, unhappily for themselves, were principals in this fight, it was a struggle in the dark. They knew little about it, beyond the grimly-patent fact that they were battling for their very lives. The outer ring of their friends and supporters and dependents knew still less, though their rage and fears were perhaps greater. The “press” seemed to know nothing at all. This unnatural silence of the City's mouthpieces, usually so resoundingly clamorous upon the one side and the other when a duel is in progress, gave a sinister aspect to the thing. The papers had been gagged and blindfolded for the occasion. This in itself was of baleful significance. It was not a duel which they had been bribed to ignore. It was an assassination.
Outwardly there was nothing to see, save the unofficial, bald statement that on August 1st, the latest of twelve fortnightly settlements in this stock, Rubber Consols had been bid for, and carried over, at 15 pounds for one-pound shares. The information concerned the public at large not at all. Nobody knew of any friend or neighbour who was fortunate enough to possess some of these shares. Readers here and there, noting the figures, must have said to themselves that certain lucky people were coining money, but very little happened to be printed as to the identity of these people. Stray notes were beginning to appear in the personal columns of the afternoon papers about a “Rubber King” of the name of Thorpe, but the modern exploitation of the world's four corners makes so many “kings” that the name had not, as yet, familiarized itself to the popular eye.