Matters did not mend after his departure. Creditors became more insistent, subpoenas more numerous. Then one day, like a bolt from the blue, came the final catastrophe which sent the whole Marsh edifice tumbling like a house of cards. Something unexpectedly happened in Wall Street. Caught in a bad squeeze of the "shorts," involved in another shady transaction of a nature still more serious than the last scandal, Jimmy staggered home one night with ruin and worse staring him in the face. This time there was no way out possible. He could not raise a dollar, and Bascom Cooley, his lawyer and crony, the only man whose skill and influence could save him, was absent in Europe. It was the end of everything. He must either resign himself to prison stripes or blow his brains out. Affairs had reached this crisis in the Marsh household when late one evening a messenger boy brought to West Seventy-second Street the following cablegram: "New York office notifies me Richard Marsh died suddenly in Pittsburg yesterday. Am returning on the next steamer. "BASCOM COOLEY." CHAPTER II. "No--no, my boy--this is on me!" protested Mr. Cooley, drawing a wad of money from his vest pocket and carelessly tossing a hundred-franc note across the counter. While the cockney bartender of the English Tavern in the Champs Elysees counted out the change, Tod, with an unsteady hand, raised to his lips the glass of foaming, sparkling _Clicquot_. "Here's to Uncle Dick--bless him!" "Amen!" responded Mr. Cooley fervently. The regular frequenters of the place, jockeys, bookmakers, racing touts, and other persons of dubious appearance and pursuits who make up that queer riffraff of British sporting characters always found drifting about the French metropolis, either flush after recent winnings at Longchamps or out at elbow from an extraordinary run of ill luck--all these worthies nudged each other and grinned as they watched the two Americans. There was no doubt in everyone's mind as to the nationality of the strangers. Only Yankees could afford the luxury of opening "fizz" so early in the day. What the onlookers did not know, of course, was that an event of exceptional importance had brought the two Americans together on this particular morning and that Tod Chase and Bascom Cooley, the well-known New York lawyer, were celebrating an auspicious event by "setting 'em up." Otherwise there would be little excuse for loitering in the small, stuffy barroom, with its pungent odor of stale beer and atmosphere thick with tobacco smoke, when the call of the beautiful world without was so strong.