Читать книгу A Change in the Cabinet онлайн

31 страница из 64

Ole Man Benson awoke, therefore, to a scene of great discomfort, but upon such a date and with a prospect of so considerable an increase of fortune awaiting him upon that very day, he was the gayest of the company, and in spite of his years he shovelled away with the best of them, a-splendid-type-of-Anglo-Saxon-manhood.

By one o’clock that noon the telegraph at last was working, and the first messages came through to the little depot; they concerned a riot in a local home for paralytics. Next, before two, news was conveyed of an outbreak of religious mania in the town of Omaha. It was not till a late hour in the evening that Ole Man Benson, waiting anxiously for the report of the great speech, heard the earliest tidings of the practical joke which Providence—in spite of Gen. Porfirio Diaz’ equable and masterly rule—had played him in the distant tropics.

The same rapidity of thought which had enabled Theocritus to accumulate his vast fortune enabled him in that moment to perceive that he was ruined. Not indeed necessarily for ever,—he had known such things before—but at any rate in a manner sufficiently hefty to produce his immediate collapse.