“You’ve come back none too soon, old man,” he began in a serious voice. “Things are really in a very bad way, and I am not ready to take any further steps without your direct authority. A mob in Milwaukee burned two or three big grain elevators with several million bushels of wheat day before yesterday; there have been bread riots in Buffalo and Pittsburg, and there would have been bloody work in Chicago this week if we had not broken the corner in retail bread prices. The president has called a special session of Congress to meet early next month. The outlook is even more critical than when I cabled you, and no mere palliative measures will relieve the situation. It will require a very radical remedy to prevent serious disaster in several forms.” “I’m mighty sorry to hear it, Jack. Do you think things are much worse than they would have been if we had not interfered last winter?” asked Brent, with a discouraged air. “That’s hard to say,” replied Wharton in some doubt. “I presume we should have had a blue panic, plenty of failures, commercial paralysis, suspension of all kinds of manufacturing, low prices, and the pinch of the hardest of hard times--just a repetition of what the country has to go through once in twenty years or so. What is happening now is very different. It is an entirely new experience, and its very novelty adds to the danger, because nobody really understands it or knows how to deal with it. Instead of too little money, we have too much. In ordinary hard times people get frightened and don’t dare invest in the usual ways. So they hoard their money till the scare is over. It’s just the opposite now. The country seems to have lost confidence in money itself. That is something which hasn’t happened before in our day. So the popular passion is to hoard things of intrinsic value instead of gold.” “How much have you succeeded in borrowing?” “Only about fifteen millions so far. Such large loans cannot be negotiated as rapidly as I hoped, but within three or four days we shall be able to withdraw fully fifty millions from the money market, and by the time Congress meets, twice that. The effect will be beneficial, no doubt, but its full influence will not be felt for a month at least, and in the meantime there is a very dangerous emergency to meet.” “Well, John, what can we do? I confess I am unequal to the problem,” and the worry and anxiety upon Brent’s countenance gave him more the appearance of a man helpless in the face of bankruptcy than of a Crœsus struggling under too great a load of wealth. Wharton looked at his friend closely in the rather dim light of a lamp which lit that corner of the cabin before replying. After a moment or two, he said, with an earnestness of which Brent had not thought him capable: