THE PROPHETS August in town found an unusual number of New York men at the clubs, at the restaurants, at the summer theatres.

Men who very seldom shoved their noses inside the metropolitan oven during the summer baking were now to be met everywhere and anywhere within the financial district and without.

The sky-perched and magnificent down-town "clubs" were full of men who under normal circumstances would have remained at Newport, Lenox, Bar Harbor, or who at least would have spent the greater portion of the summer on their yachts or their Long Island estates.
And in every man's hand or pocket was a newspaper.
They were scarcely worth reading for mere pleasure, these New York newspapers; indeed, there was scarcely anything in them to read except a daily record of the steady decline in securities of every description; paragraphs noting the passing of dividends; columns setting forth minutely the opinions of very wealthy men concerning the business outlook; chronicles in detail of suits brought against railroads and against great industrial corporations; accounts of inquiries by State and by Federal authorities into combinations resulting in an alleged violation of various laws.
Here and there a failure of some bucket-branded broker was noted--the reports echoing like the first dropping shots along the firing line.
Even to the most casual and uninterested outsider it was evident that already the metropolis was under a tension; that the tension was increasing almost imperceptibly day by day; that there seemed to be no very clear idea as to the reason of it, only a confused apprehension, an apparently unreassuring fear of some grotesque danger ahead, which daily reading of the newspapers was not at all calculated to allay.
Of course there were precise reasons for impending trouble given and reiterated by those amateurs of finance and politics whose opinions are at the disposal of the newspaper-reading public.
Prolixity characterised these solemn utterances, packed full of cant phrases such as "undigested securities" and "the treacherous attack on the nation's integrity." Two principal reasons were given for the local financial uneasiness; and the one made the other ridiculous--first, that the nation's Executive was mad as Nero and had deliberately begun a senseless holocaust involving the entire nation; the other that a "panic" was due, anyway.
It resembled the logic of the White Queen of immortal memory, who began screaming before she pricked her finger in order to save herself any emotion after the pin had drawn blood.
Men knew in their hearts that there was no real reason for impending trouble; that this menace was an unreal thing, intangible, without substance--only a shadow cast by their own assininity.
Yet shadows can be made real property when authority so ordains.

Because there was once a man with a donkey who met a stranger in the desert.
The stranger bargained for and bought the donkey; the late owner shoved the shekels into his ample pockets and sat down in the mule's shadow to escape the sun; and the new owner brought suit to recover the rent due him for the occupation of the shadow cast by his donkey.
There was also a mule which waited seven years to kick.
There are asses and mules and all sorts of shadows.

The ordinance of authority can affect only the shadow; the substance is immutable.
Among other serious gentlemen of consideration and means who had been unaccustomed to haunt the metropolis in the dog days was Colonel Alexander Mallett, President of the Half Moon Trust Company, and incidentally Duane's father.
His town-house was still open, although his wife and daughter were in the country.