"You are rattled yourself, Lawson. There's no need for excitement. I merely offered the suggestion. Everything is going well," he reassured me, but the picture his words conjured before my mind disturbed me all day. That he would dare do what he had suggested I did not credit, for the assurances I had were too solemn to allow me to believe such treachery could be meditated. Nevertheless I brooded over the matter, and late in the afternoon ran down to 26 Broadway, ostensibly to hear the latest news from the bank, but really to try if I could not look into Mr. Rogers' head and see if the imps I had sighted early in the day were still there.
Mr. Rogers was over with Stillman at the bank. In half an hour he came in, and the excitement he labored under was plainly evident in his face.
"Lawson," he said, "no one has ever seen anything like this before. Stillman is bewildered. He says it looks as though by to-morrow there will be a mob around the bank doors, and if between now and then anything unusual should happen, there'll be the devil to pay sure. I tell you I'm so tired out that I'm going home now to rest up."
Together we went uptown on the Elevated, and when I left him at Thirty-third Street to cross over to my hotel, somehow the dark forebodings of the morning had been lulled by his frank geniality and carried away by his enthusiastic rejoicings in the success of our enterprise. The picture of that soft spring evening hangs in my memory's gallery—the declining sun seen through a long perspective of gilded brick and brownstone façades, the heavy rumble of trains, the clamor of newsboys crying last editions, the packed cable-cars slowly threading their way amid the hurrying crowds of clerks and shop girls streaming homeward, the cabs swinging in and out of the throng, through whose windows I caught glimpses of jewels on bare shoulders, light silks, and sweeping plumes—the butterflies of fashion or folly hurrying out on their evening trysts. Broadway, with its hundreds of sights and sounds, was before me in the hour of its transformation, the street lamps breaking into