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Peterkin had been doing his best to make amends for past errors by present enthusiasm of application. He fired no less earnestly than the butcher's son. Now that Eugene Aronson was dead, Pilzer had become Peterkin's chief patron and guide. He would be doing right if he did what that brave Pilzer did, he was thinking, while he was conscious of Fracasse's eyes boring into his back.
Not only Rostocker and Aronson, but a dozen others were in the cul de sac guarded by this surprising and bloody-minded lamb. Most of the names were well-known as those of "wreckers." In this category belonged Blaustein, Ganz, Rothfoere, Lewis, Ascher, and Mendel, and if Harding, Carpenter, and Vesey could not be so confidently classified, at least their misfortune excited no particular sympathy.
Stransky slept, with his head on his arm, as soundly as Eugene Aronson, his antithesis in character; the others slept no better than the men of the 128th. The night passed without any alarm except that of their own thoughts, and they welcomed dawn as a relief from suspense. There was no hot coffee this morning, and they washed down their rations with water from their canteens.
Lord Plowden had sought out Rostocker and Aronson, and had told them that he had it in his power ignominiously to break the "corner." He could hardly have told them the exact nature of his power, because until he should have seen Tavender he did not himself know what it was.
"Probably not very much," returned Dick, quickly. "Probably some of the land company people would buy it in for a song," he added, bitterly. "Well, Mr. Rover, that is not my affair," and Mr. Aronson shrugged his shoulders. "I came in only to serve you notice that the twenty thousand dollars will have to be paid one week from to-day." "Where are your offices, Mr. Aronson?"
Both Rostocker and Aronson, who, it was said, were worst hit, were men of great wealth, but they had systematically amassed these fortunes by strangling in their cradles weak enterprises, and by undermining and toppling over other enterprises which would not have been weak if they had been given a legitimate chance to live.
Through the press, an unconscious instrument of his purpose, the astute premier has inoculated them with the virus of militant patriotism. Day by day the crisis has become more acute; day by day the war fever has risen in their veins. Big Eugene Aronson believes everything he reads; his country can do no wrong.
"Come on, Hugo! Out with it!" Hugo's brow contracted; the lines of the mask were drawn in deliberate seriousness. "I never hear war mentioned that I don't have a shiver right down my spine, as I did when I was a little boy and went into the cellar without a light," he replied. "Fear?" exclaimed Eugene Aronson, the farmer's son, whose big, plain face expressed dumb incomprehension.
"Yes, my brother and I are running this business now." "And yet you said you did not know why I had called," continued Mr. Aronson, in apparent astonishment. "That is strange. Did not your father tell you about his investment in the Sharon Valley Land Company?" "I never heard of the company before," returned Dick, promptly.
A superstitious nature, which, at the outset of the war, had convinced him that he must be killed in the first charge, now, as the result of his survival, gave him all the faith of Eugene Aronson that the bullet would never be made that could kill him. "Was the attack general all along the front?" some one asked. "We couldn't tell. All we knew was the hell around us."
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