When Sponley had told him about it in the little room in the Eagle Café, the prospect of being able, with so small an act, to work John Bagsbury an injury, had pleased him. And even in doing it he enjoyed the feeling of guilty excitement that had come over him. He hated John, partly because of the various rascalities he had been practising upon the Banker in the past six months, partly because he did not dare hate Melville Sponley. His resentment of the insult the Bear had paid him at the Eagle bar was simply fuel to his eagerness to pass on the injury to John. The cream of the stratagem, what he licked his lips over as he rode home from the bank, was that there could be no proof, not a grain, that he had not merely made a very natural mistake. But for all that he was afraid. For no assignable reason, at first, save that he was a coward; but soon his cowardice began suggesting reasons. He thought of a good many disquieting possibilities during the evening, and, later, in the restless hours while he slept or dozed, his dreams spun about them a tangle of frightful grotesques. Awake or asleep the Banker troubled him, pursuing him through his dreams in a hundred horrible shapes, and at his elbow when he waked out of them and lay, with the rigor of nightmare still in his muscles and the perspiration of fear on his skin, trying to console himself with the thought that there was nothing they could prove. There would be one unpleasant moment when the Banker would look at him, perhaps speak to him, but that would soon be over. If he could only brazen it out through that, all would go well. Much as he dreaded the day that was coming, he welcomed the light that announced it. At a, for him, ridiculously early hour, he dressed and ordered his breakfast. He stormed because it was not ready; but when it was brought to him, he did not eat it, for in the interval he had got a morning paper, and had found there additional ground for his uneasiness. There was, as he had expected, a detailed account of the run, and it made rather good reading, ending, as it did, with a highly colored description of the coming of reënforcements. But he found more than he had bargained for in another column, whose head-lines made him cold and sick and hollow at the stomach, a report of an interview with John Bagsbury, which began with these words:-- “The run on our bank to-day was not an accident. It was deliberately provoked in order to bear the lard market. That is not a guess. I am speaking from knowledge.” John never took the trouble to be plausible. He did not arrange the truth to give it a lifelike appearance. When he made that statement, boldly, without argument or corroborative detail, to the half-dozen reporters who had gathered in his library, they believed him, and ninety per cent of the men who read the words in newspaper type next morning also believed.