silence, in which two minds had travelled far.

"I put it into mines."

"What mines?"

"Out on Lake Superior."

"What sort of mines?"

"Arsenic."

Charley's eye-glass dropped, and rattled against the gold button of his
white waistcoat.

"In arsenic-mines!" He put the monocle to his eye again. "On whose
advice?"

"John Brown's."

"John Brown's!" Charley Steele's ideas were suddenly shaken and
scattered by a man's name, as a bolting horse will crumple into confusion
a crowd of people. So this was the way his John Brown had come home to
roost. He lifted the empty whiskey-glass to his lips and drained air.
He was terribly thirsty; he needed something to pull himself together.
Five years of dissipation had not robbed him of his splendid native
ability, but it had, as it were, broken the continuity of his will and
the sequence of his intellect.

"It was not investment?" he asked, his tongue thick and hot in his