"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 mouth.
"No.