Almost everybody was out of town,--with the exception of some nine-tenths of the city’s total population. These unfortunate town-bound mortals sweltered and sweated in office, store and cottage, or sweltered and died in the network of mean streets beyond the railroad tracks. Daily from the slums crept slow lines of carriages, headed too often by a hideous white vehicle which in grisly panoply was carrying some silent child on its first trip to the country; there to have the day of blesséd release from noise and overcrowding marked--if the parents could scrape together enough insurance money--with a white stone. In gutter and alleyway of the tenement district swarmed the gaunt little survivors. In doorways or in shaded corners of roofs or in overcrowded bars panted their elders. The residence streets one by one had gone blind and lay empty, fraught with a strange lifelessness. Ultra-exclusive Pompton Avenue, its houses converted into still mausoleums, baked under the merciless sun. Its lawns ran rank. From the wide thoroughfare itself arose endless whirls of dust and the smell of boiling asphalt. A few homes still wore the awnings and veranda lattices of June; proclaiming the presence of tenants who could not yet shake from their feet--or from any other part of their grimed anatomies--the dust of the city. Caleb Conover, in his suffocating private office, toiled on untiring. On his chilled steeled nerves and toughened body, the heat hurled itself in vain. Coatless, collarless, without waistcoat, his shirt neck wide open, his suspenders hanging, he ploughed his daily route through mountains of work; his worn out office force plodding wearily in his impetuous wake. And in these days of dust and scorching sun, Caleb was indeed making hay, after his own fashion. To him was due the fact that more Pompton Avenue residences were open this summer than ever before. Men who in social life were wont to look on him as a pariah, were none the less jumping as he pulled the commercial strings and were dancing to his music. For Caleb, his slow lines at length laid out, was making a general advance upon the financial defenses behind which for years the staid business men of the county had dozed in short-sighted security. The first news of the attack came with the announcement of his merger of two railroads--the Broomell-Shelp and the Upstate--with the C. G. & X.; which virtually gave the last named road a monopoly of state traffic. Stocks had been hammered down, share-holders stampeded by calamity-rumors, and holdings bought in at panic rates by the Fighter. Then had come reorganization and--presto! the C. G. & X. had benevolently assimilated its two chief rivals. Men who had considered their railroad stock as safe an investment as government bonds now stayed in town for lack of funds to go away for the summer; or else in order to seek eager alliance with the Fighter’s swift-swelling interests. Pompton Avenue was hard hit.