During the next forty-eight hours the meteoric speed of his career, his swift adjustment of means to ends, his varied and almost instantaneous decisions, and above all the driving force of the moral arguments which he addressed to those larger shareholders of Native Industries Limited whom in so brief a time he succeeded in running to earth, all this gave me a conception of his abilities to which, I confess, that till then I had hardly done justice. Nor do I think the average reader could follow through all its ramifications that inspired _sauve qui peut_, which, in such short space of time, carried moral devastation to so many Free Evangelical back-parlours--fortresses for all the virtues. Suffice it that Mr. Trimblerigg, having obtained a complete list of the shareholders in Native Industries Limited, discovered for truth what his sanguine mind had envisaged as a blessed possibility--that nearly half of the Company’s shares were actually in the hands of Free Church ministers and of other prominent and privileged members of their congregations, and that all unknown to itself the Free Evangelical Body--that great instrument for the establishment of God’s Kingdom on earth--had got one of its feet well planted in that very stronghold of the Devil against which it was directing its assault--an awkward, or an advantageous position according to the use made of it. Mr. Trimblerigg, whose apprehension and anguish had been so great that in the first ten hours after his discovery he could eat no breakfast, had during the next ten, with travel, telegram, and telephone, done such an enormous amount of work and to such good purpose, that before the day was out he had begun almost to enjoy himself. In that brief space of time he had captured not only the council of the Free Church Congress, and three of its ex-Presidents, but the President-elect and five of its most shining lights in the financial world as well--men who had always maintained publicly that they held their wealth as a sacred trust from the Powers above for the service of humanity. Now he showed them their chance. While the shares of the affiliated companies in Puto-Congo Consolidated lay battered on the market, opportunity for good Samaritans presented itself on a large scale. For the preaching missionary, who also travelled for Native Industries Limited, had done his agency thoroughly and well, and Mr. Trimblerigg’s saving hopes were abundantly realized. Here they all were, almost without knowing it--some not knowing it at all; others knowing it but lying low, trusting that affiliation carried with it no responsibility for the administrative acts of Puto-Congo Consolidated, and finding much virtue in the difference of a name--here they all were in the same box, and the lid of it suddenly opened like graves for the day of judgment.