CHAPTER XVIII.
BON CHIEN The chronology of that last dark and bitter week in November might have been written "necrology." On Monday Colonel Mallett died about sundown; on Wednesday the Hon.

John D.Ellis, while examining an automatic revolver in his bath-room, met with one of those unfortunate and fatal accidents which sometimes happen in times of great financial depression.
Thursday Amos Flack carelessly disappeared, leaving no address; and on the last day of the week Emanuel Klawber politely excused himself to a group of very solemn gentlemen who had been assisting him in the well-known and popular game of "Hunt the Books"; and, stepping outside the door of the director's office, carefully destroyed what little life had not already been scared out of his three-hundred-pound person.
It had been raining all day; Dysart had not felt very well, and Klawber's unpleasant performance made him ill.

He stood in the rain watching the ambulance arriving at a gallop, then, sickened, turned away through the dark and dripping crowds, crossed the street, and, lowering his head against the storm, drove both gloved hands deep into the pockets of his fashionably cut rain-coat, and started for home.
It mattered nothing to him that several hard-working newspaper men might desire to secure his version of Mr.Klawber's taking off, or of his explanation for it or his sensations concerning it.

It mattered nothing to him that the afternoon papers reported the arrest of James Skelton, or that Max Moebus had inadvertently, and no doubt in a moment of intense abstraction, taken a steamer for Europe and the books of the Shoshone Bank.
These matters, now seemed a great way off--too unreal to be of personal moment.

He was feeling sick; that occupied his mind.