equal to a frugal New Hampshire competence.

"How long have I got?" was the laconic wire which he sent to Loring, the
secretary of the Western Pacific Advisory Board in Boston, from whom his
hint had come. And when Loring replied that the grading and track-laying
contracts were already awarded, there was at least one "long" on the
Gaston real estate exchange who wrought desperately night and day to
"unload".

As it turned out, the race against time was both a victory and a defeat.
On the morning when the _Daily Clarion_ sounded the first note of public
alarm, David Kent took up the last of his bank promises-to-pay, and
transferred his final mortgaged holding in Gaston realty. When it was done
he locked himself in his office in the Farquhar Building and balanced the
account. On leaving the New Hampshire country town to try the new cast for
fortune in the golden West, he had turned his small patrimony into
cash--some ten thousand dollars of it. To set over against the bill of
exchange for this amount, which he had brought to Gaston a year earlier,
there were a clean name, a few hundred dollars in bank, six lots, bought
and paid for, in one of the Gaston suburbs, and a vast deal of experience.

Kent ran his hands through his hair, opened the check-book and hastily
filled out a check payable to himself for the remaining few hundreds. When
he reached the Apache National on the corner of Colorado and Texas
Streets, he was the one hundred and twenty-seventh man in the queue, which
extended around the corner and doubled back and forth in the cross-street
to the stoppage of all traffic. The announcement in the _Clarion_ had done
its work, and the baleful flower of panic, which is a juggler's rose for
quick-growing possibilities, was filling the very air of the street with
its acrid perfume--the scent of all others that soonest drives men mad.