at his State capital there was an ugly three minutes in the State treasurer's office and then it was over. Russell went out of the room, and Wharton went into the vault and filled his little valise with school bonds. Wharton had no trouble in floating them. He deposited them with a Washington bank where he had done all his business for twenty years. The money he realized went into the wheat pit in New York, and he glorified Tom Wharton and prepared to enjoy him forever. For it is the chief end of some self-made men to confuse their deities.
Ten days later wheat shot into the nineties, turning nimble hand-springs over the fractional points. And Senator Thomas Wharton went to the safety deposit box for even a bone to feed the dogs of the pit which were gnawing his margins. When he got there the cupboard was bare, and so the poor dogs had to lick their chops over the memory of the feasts Wharton had thrown to them. Wharton did not expect to find anything in his box when he went, and yet, until he had looked over all his plunder there and found not one scrap of paper negotiable for a dollar, he did not realize that the end had come absolutely.
Wharton fumbled for nearly a minute, taking the key from the box. The close air of the room seemed to stifle him, and he hurried—almost staggered—into the fresh air, which he breathed deeply. His tremor came from mental causes partly—induced by the maddening grip of the taut tether of his fate, but his nerves were rioting because they knew no master save whiskey. As Wharton walked back to the Shoreham, a distance of ten blocks, he lighted and threw away four cigars. And cigar-ashes fell on the immaculate vest. He raged because he could not see his way, but his mind's eyes were blinded by dust from the apples of Sodom. His isolation among his fellows smote him when he saw that he was afraid to advise with his banker and ashamed to talk with his lawyer. Way back deeply in his submerged consciousness was the concept of the penitentiary, conceived hardly as a possibility—much less a probability; yet the thing stuck there like a thorn in the flesh. After pacing the diagonal lines of his room in the hotel for half an hour, Wharton went to the telephone and asked the local banker who held the stolen bonds to hold them off the market for twenty-four hours. The request was granted, for Wharton had done many hundred thousand dollars' worth of business at the bank. With a twenty-four hours' reprieve Wharton thought he could find some ford that would lead him back over the fatal Rubicon he had crossed. He decided to direct all his legislative force for a few hours away from the Wharton pension bill and into another channel. The dead wall of a prison seemed to bar his path; but the jaws that hung loose while he walked from the safety deposit vault to his hotel were set when he went forth to burrow under his barrier.
Now there were in Washington two electric light and power companies contesting for business—one, old and established, with wires strung all over the city; the other a suburban concern, with a city franchise, but without wires in the city. For several months an innocent-looking bill, which provided that all electric light wires be buried twenty inches under ground, had rested in a pigeon-hole of Wharton's desk in the committee-room of the District of Columbia. To make this bill a law would be in effect to put the new electric company on an equal footing with the old company. Wharton himself had quietly urged the organization of the new company. He had pushed the bill through the lower house of Congress, and shortly thereafter he found $150,000 worth of the new company's stock in his safety deposit box. When the Wharton pension bill should become a law it had been Wharton's purpose to push the underground electric wire bill through the senate and unload the stock he owned for a fortune. Two hours after Wharton left his hotel the House underground wire bill had been recommended for passage by the Senate committee of the District of Columbia and had been advanced on the calendar for consideration on the following day. For the old company was rich and Wharton believed that it would not see five years' dividends eaten up by trench-diggers without a struggle. He did not go to his hotel that night, and Mrs. Wharton went to sleep with a familiar suspicion by her side that for once in its long hateful life was false. For Wharton, greedy, desperate,
