Often a man's hands indicate his age, and his betrayed him, giving the lie to his lithe, straight, graceful figure.

The man had aged amazingly in a month or two.
Matters were not going very well with him.

For one thing, the Half-Moon Trust Company had finally terminated all dealings with the gorgeous marble-pillared temple of high finance of which he was a director.

For another, he had met the men of the West, and for them he had done things which he did not always care to think about.

For another, money was becoming disturbingly scarce, and the time was already past for selling securities.
During the last year he had been vaguely aware of some occult hostility to himself and his enterprises--not the normal hostility of business aggression--but something indefinable--merely negative at first, then more disturbing, sinister, foreboding; something in the very air to which he was growing more sensitive every day.
By all laws of finance, by all signs and omens, a serious reaction from the saturnalia of the last few years was already over-due.