At the top of the first page of _The Clarion_, smeared across three columns in letters which, to Mr. Foxman's petrified gaze, seemed cubits high, ran a certain well-remembered scare head, and under that, in two-column measure, a box of black-faced type, and under that, with its accusations bristling out from the body matter like naked lance tips, followed the story which told of the proposed Pearl Street trolley grab and the proposed East Side merger steal. All of it was there, every word of it, from the crackling first paragraph to the stinging wasp tail of the last sentence! The telephone has played a considerable part in this recital. It is to play still one more part and then we are done with telephones. Mr. Foxman regained the faculty of consecutive thought--presently he did. He ran to the telephone, and after a little time during which he wildly blasphemed at the delay he secured connection with the office of the firm of brokers who carried the account of Mr. X. It was too late to save anything from the wreckage; the hour for salvaging had gone by. A clerk's voice, over the wire, conveyed back the melancholy tidings. A bomb had burst in Wall Street that morning. The East Side merger scheme had been blown into smithereens by a sensational story appearing in _The Clarion_, and the fragments still were falling in a clattering shower on the floor of the stock exchange. As for Pearl Street trolley common, that had gone clear through to the basement. The last quotation on this forsaken stock had been seven and a half asked, and nothing at all offered. The account of Mr. X, therefore, was an account no longer; it was off the books. Mr. X's ten-point margin having been exhausted, Mr. X had been closed out, and to all intents and purposes neither he nor his account any longer existed. Mr. Foxman's indisposition increased in the intensity of its visible symptoms until the alarmed maid, standing helplessly by, decided that Mr. Foxman was about to have a stroke of some sort. As a matter of fact he had already had it--two strokes really, both of them severe ones. * * * * * We go back a little now--to the evening before. We go back to the alcoholic Hemburg, trying to make good in his _ad-interim_ eminence as acting make-up editor and, in pursuance of this ambition, riding for the time being upon the water wagon, with every personal intention of continuing so to ride during all time to come. When he came on duty shortly after seven o'clock every famished, tortured fibre in him was calling out for whiskey. His thirst was riding him like an Old Man of the Seas. He sweated cold drops in his misery and, to bolster his resolution, called up every shred of moral strength that remained to him. Inside him a weakened will fought with an outraged appetite, and his jangled nerves bore the stress of this struggle between determination and a frightful craving.