Inquiries at the Elizabeth depot confirmed his story. The Jersey Central and Pennsylvania tracks run side by side through the station. At nine-thirty on the night of January fifteenth the ticket agent of the Pennsylvania Line remembered selling a Philadelphia ticket to a man answering the description of Barker. He did not see this man board the train, being busy at the time in his office. None of the train officials had any recollection of such a passenger, but as the coaches were full, the coming and going of people continuous, he might easily have been overlooked. After this there was no more doubt as to Barker’s flight. The papers announced it to an amazed public, shaken to its core by the downfall of one of its financial giants. The collapse of the Copper Pool was complete and Wall Street rocked in the last throes of panic. From the wreckage the voices of victims called down curses on the traitor, the man who had planned the ruin of his associates and got away with it. They congregated in the Whitney office where the air was sulphurous with their fury. And from the Whitney office the Whitney detectives, Jerry O’Mally at their head, slipped away to Philadelphia, with their noses to the trail. With his picture on the front page of every paper in the country it would be hard for Barker to elude them, but he had three days’ start, and, as O’Mally summed it up, "It has only taken seven to make the world." CHAPTER IV MOLLY TELLS THE STORY The day after the Harland inquest I meant to go down and see Iola and find out if she’d heard anything from Miss Whitehall. But that day I got sidetracked some way or other and the next it rained. Usually I don’t mind rain, but this was the real wet, straight kind that would get in at you if you wore a diver’s suit. As I stood at the parlor window, looking down at the street all pools and puddles, with the walls shining under a thin glaze of water, and the umbrellas like wet, black mushrooms, I got faint-hearted. I could just as well phone, and if anything had transpired (it was the business I was uneasy about) go down and help Iola through the fit of blind staggers she’d be bound to have. So presently it was: "Hello, Iola, I was coming down today but it’s too moistuous." Then Iola’s voice, sort of groaning: "Oh, Molly, is that you? I _do_ wish it had been fine and you’d have come." "Why—anything wrong?" "Oh, yes, everything. Miss Whitehall isn’t back yet, and Mr. Ford’s hardly been in at all and has such a gloom on him you wouldn’t know him, and I’m awful discouraged." "Have you tried to see Miss Whitehall?" "No, I can’t seem to get up enough spunk." "Why don’t you phone her?" "Well, I don’t know, I’m sort of scared of what I’ll hear. I thought I’d better sit around and wait, and then I thought I ought to find out, and between the two—Oh, dear, _what’s the use_!"