"What a night we have had!" she said, with an anxious note in the gentle harmonies of her voice. "We were worse frightened at the fire-bells and the shouting of men in the distance than at the drunken hoodlums who passed by the house. Was there much fighting?" "Enough--but nothing to be frightened about." "If there was violence," said Mercy, with a trace of anxiety in her tone, "I am afraid that Mr. Parks was among the misguided men. Did you see anything of him?" "No," I replied. "He escaped arrest when the Council of Nine was gathered in, for he was making a speech on the sand-lot. I inquired for him at the City Prison and the Receiving Hospital, but he wasn’t there, so I’m sure he must have escaped." Mercy breathed a sigh of relief. "Well, Mercy," said Laura Kendrick, "if you expect men to have any sense about such things, you are going to be disappointed. They are fighting animals--at any rate some of them are--and the best we can do is to have a good supply of lint and arnica on hand, and read books on the best way of treating wounds and bruises." But a few minutes later she had forgotten this sentiment of resignation, for when I set out for the office to prepare for the onslaught that must come with the opening of the business hours, her parting injunction was to "Leave the business of the police to the police, and don’t let the Kendrick family go to ruin by getting yourself knocked on the head in some harum-scarum expedition." I found Brown already at work, and his haggard face showed that he shared in the keen anxieties of the day. "This is a bad business, Mr. Hampden, a bad business," he sighed. "Four hundred thousand dollars’ worth of lumber went up in that fire last night." "Didn’t we have any insurance on it?" "Why, yes--we had one hundred and fifty thousand on it. But we had borrowed that much on the stock, and the bank holds the policy. I was hoping to get some more money on the lumber to-day, but that chance has gone." Brown shook his head and sighed as though his courage had fallen to a low ebb, and added: "I’m afraid every creditor we have will be down on us now." "How much shall we have to meet?" I asked. "I wish I could tell," he groaned. "Mr. Kendrick has been so careless about giving out his notes without having them entered on the books that I can’t say. I think there are about two hundred thousand of unsecured notes out, but there may be a million, for all I know." "How much money have we in hand?" "It’s not much. Not over twenty thousand." "How much can we get if we drop that confounded load of stock we are carrying?" "Oh, if we could unload it without breaking the price it would stand us something like two or three hundred thousand dollars, after paying off all loans on it. But it’s a ticklish market--a ticklish market. If we start to throw the stock out, there will be a slump that will wipe out our margins and leave us on the wrong side of the ledger."