“Have you heard?” I asked Galt. “The sub-Treasury has notified Washington that it cannot hold out. It may suspend at any moment.” “I suppose then eighty million healthy people will have nothing to eat, nothing to wear, no place to go, nothing to do with their idle hands. We’ll all go to hell in a handbasket.” He spoke loudly. Many faces turned toward us. A very tall, lean man, with a wild light in his eyes and a convulsive, turkey neck, laid a hand on Galt’s arm. “Right you are, my friend, if I understand your remark. We are about to witness the dawn of a new era. I have proved it. In this little pamphlet, entitled, ‘The Crime of Money--thirty reasons why it should be abolished on earth,’ I show--” “Don’t jingle your Adam’s apple at me,” said Galt, giving him a look of droll contempt. The man was struck dumb. Feeling all eyes focused on the exaggerated object thus caricatured in one astonishing stroke he began to gulp uncontrollably. There were shouts of hysterical laughter. In the confusion Galt disappeared, dragging Gates with him. The sub-Treasury held out until three o’clock and closed its doors once more in a solvent manner, probably, for the last time. Everybody believed it would capitulate to the ophidian thing the next day. There was no escape. Events were in the lap of despair. CHAPTER VII DARING THE DARK i At five o’clock that evening Galt called me on the telephone and asked me to come to his office. I had never been there. It was at 15 Exchange Place, up a long brass-mounted stairway, second floor front. The building was one of a type that has vanished,--gas lighted, wise and old, scornful of the repetitious human scene, full of phantom echoes. On his door was the name, Henry M. Galt, and nothing else. Inside was first a small, bare room in which the only light was the little that came through the opaque glass of a partition door marked “Private.” I hesitated and was about to knock on this inner door when Galt shouted: “Come in, Coxey.” He was alone, sitting with his hat on at a double desk between two screened windows at the far side of the room. He did not look up at once. “Sit down a minute,” he said, and went on reading some documents. The equipment of his establishment was mysteriously simple,--a stock ticker at one of the windows, a row of ten telephones fastened to the wall over a long shelf on which to write in a standing position, a bookkeeper’s high desk and stool, several chairs, a water cooler in disuse, a neglected newspaper file in the corner, a safe, and that was all.