“Then it wasn’t so difficult, after all?” commented Durkin, as Frances
ended a description of her three days in Leeksville.
“No, it wasn’t the trouble so much—only, for the first time in my life,
I felt so—so cruelly alone!” She found it hard to explain it to him
adequately. She wondered why it was she should always shrink from
undraping any inner corner of her soul to him, why, at times, she should
stand so reluctant to win any of the more intimate touches of
comradeship from him.
“That’s the drawback,” he remarked, wide of her mood and thought,
“that’s the drawback in doing this sort of thing by oneself!”
“We really ought to hunt in pairs, don’t you think, like timber wolves?”
She turned and looked at him, with a still mocking and yet a warmer
light coming into her eyes. Some propulsion, not of mind, but of body,
seemed to drive her involuntarily toward him—like a ship on a lee
shore, she felt—as she sniffed delicately at his cigar-scented gloves,
so anomalously redolent of virility, of masculinity, of something
compelling and masterful, where they lay in her nervously toying
fingers. She tried to laugh at herself, with chastening scorn; but she
could not.
“And out of it all,” he went on, “when brokerage fees and other things
are counted, we have made just three hundred and sixty-seven dollars!”
“Only that?”
“I had no more than the thirty minutes, you see, for a margin to work
on!”
She pushed back her hair with a languid hand.
“But why cry over spilt milk?” she asked, wearily. Firmer and firmer,
she felt, this mad fever of money-getting was taking hold on him.
“Especially when we seem about to wade knee-deep in cream!”
She made a last effort to fall in with his mood of ruthless aggression.
“Yes; what’s this you were going to open my eyes with?”
The final vestige of his clouded restraint slipped away from Durkin’s
mind.
“I had better start right at the beginning, hadn’t I?” he queried, cigar
in hand, while she nodded comfortably to the silent question as to
whether or not he might smoke.
“I suppose you know that Curry was once a New Orleans cotton broker. It
was a little over two years ago that he first came to New York, with
about a million and a half of his own, and an available three or four
million belonging to a pool that was to back him through thick and thin.
This they did, when he became a member of the Cotton Exchange. Then step
by step he began to plan out his campaign, patiently and laboriously
plotting and scheming and manipulating and increasing his power, until
the newspaper-men dropped into the habit of speaking of him as the
Cotton King, and the old home pool itself got a little afraid of him,
and held a few secret meetings to talk things over.”
“But how did this campaign end?”
“It has not ended. Of just how it will end only two men, outside of
Curry and his confidential old head-broker down on the Exchange floor,
have any inkling.”
“Who is the _other_ man?” asked Frances quietly.
Durkin smiled covertly, with a half-mockingly bowed “Thanks!”
“The other man, of course, not counting myself, is the operator, or,
rather, the private secretary, he keeps at the home end of the wire he
has had put into his house, for carrying on his collateral
manipulations, as it were.”
“I understand,” said Frances.
“And then comes myself,” he added confidently.
The woman settled back in her leather-lined arm-chair, locking her
slender white fingers together above her head. The clustered lights of
the chandelier threw heavy shadows about her quiet eyes, and for the
first time Durkin noticed the tender little hollow just under her
cheek-bones, lending an indescribable touch of tragedy to the old-time
softer oval of her face.
“Now this is what our friend Curry has been doing, in a nutshell. For
months and months he has been the acknowledged bull leader of the
Exchange. Point by point, week by week and day by day, he has managed to
send cotton up. Where it was at first 11 and 12 and perhaps 13 cents, he
has shouldered, say, August cotton up to 16.55, and July up to 17.30 and
May up to 17.20. Day before yesterday July cotton advanced to 17.65 in
New Orleans. Some time, and some time mighty soon—if not tomorrow, then
the next day, or perhaps even the next—every option is going to go
still higher. And this man Curry is the imperial dictator of it all. He
is known to have interests behind him that amount to millions now. And
this is the point I’m coming to: this present week is to see the rocket
go up and burst.”
Durkin was on his feet by this time pacing up and down the room.
“The first, but not the final, climax of all this plotting is
twenty-cent cotton.”
“Has it ever been that before?”
“Never! It has not been above seventeen cents, not since 1873!” declared
Durkin, excitedly. “But here is the important part of it all, the second
climax, as it were. When it strikes nineteen his old home pool are going
to abdicate. They are going to turn traitor on him, I mean, and suddenly
stand from under. Then here is the third and last climax: Curry knows
this fact; he knows they’re making ready to crush him. And when they get
ready he’s going to turn and smash ’em, smash ’em and sling ’em down,
even though he goes with them in the crash. Which he won’t, if he’s the
Curry I take him to be. In other words, Frank, at the right moment he is
going to abdicate from the bull movement absolutely, before it is
publicly realized.”
“It all seems vague and misty to me—but I suppose you know.”
“Know? Why, I’ve been rioting through his holy of holies for two days
now. I’ve been cutting in and reading his own private wire. He firmly
intends to forsake this bull movement, which, apparently, he has spent
so much time and toil in building up. But in reality, out of the crash
that comes with a collapsing market—and it must collapse when he stands
from under!—he is to sit and see a million or two rain down into his
lap.”
“But can he, one solitary man, do all this—I mean do it unmistakably,
inevitably?”
“Yes, he can. I firmly believe that nothing short of a miracle can now
upset his plan. Today he is not only the leader of the cotton pit; he is
both openly and tacitly the supreme dictator of the market—of the
world’s market. Why, last week, when he publicly announced that he was
going down to Lakewood for a couple of days, the market fell back to
12.85 for an hour or two, and he had to jump in and start buying, just
to give a little order to things. Somebody even said that when his wife
and an actress friend of hers visited the Exchange gallery he asked them
if they’d like to see a little panic on the floor. The actress said
she’d love to see cotton go up a few points if he wouldn’t mind. Curry
said all right, to watch out for some real acting. So he started down
into the pit and pulled the strings until his puppets danced to their
hearts’ content.”
Frances nodded her appreciation of the scene’s dramatic values, and
waited for Durkin to continue.
“And one minor result of that was that one hour later a well-known
cotton merchant was found in his chair, with a slowly widening stain of
red on his shirt front, as the evening papers put it. He had shot
himself through the heart—utterly ruined by that last little capricious
rise in our Cotton King’s market.”
“Who, after all, is not much better than a wire-tapper!” exclaimed the
woman, with her mirthless little laugh of scorn.
“There’s a difference—he thinks in big figures and affairs; we, up till
now, have worked and worried and fretted over little things. This man
Curry, too, is a sort of Napoleon. ‘You have to smash the eggs to make
your omelet,’ was all he said when he heard that a big brokerage firm
had closed its one hundred and twenty-five offices because of his bull
operations. Why, this week he’s making his clerks eat and sleep right in
the offices—he’s turned one of the rooms into a sort of dormitory, and
has their meals sent up to them. And outside of all this he’s
manipulating his own underground movement, doing that over his home
wire, after his regular office hours.”
“And this is the wire you have tapped?”
“Yes, that’s the wire that has been giving me my information—or,
rather, little scattered shreds of it. But here, mind, is where the
difficulty comes in. Curry has got to let his partner, Green, down in
New Orleans, in on the last movement of his campaign, so that the two
can strike together. But he is wise, and he isn’t trusting that tip to
any open wire. When the time comes it’s to be a cipher message. It will
read, ‘Helen sails’—then such and such a time on such and such a day.
That message Curry’s confidential operator will send out over the wire,
under the protection of a quadruplex, from his Wall Street office. And
that is the message I have to intercept.”
She was moving her head slowly up and down, gazing at him with unseeing
eyes.
“And you have some plan for doing it?”
“Precisely,” replied Durkin, wheeling nervously back and forth. “This is
where I’ve got to run the gauntlet of the whole Postal-Union system, cut
in on their double-guarded wires, and get away with my information
without being caught.”
“But you can’t do it, Jim. It’s impossible.”
“Oh, but it _is_ possible, quite possible!” he said, halting for a
moment before her. “Here’s where the climax comes to my story—the one I
started to tell you over the ’phone. You see, just at the time of that
little conduit fire the Postal-Union Company was having trouble with the
Electrical Workers’ Union. I happened to be laying in the supplies for
that up-town loop of mine when I found they were offering two dollars an
hour for expert work. I jumped on a Broadway car, and took the plunge.”
“What plunge, Jim?”
“I mean that I applied for work, down there, as a cable-splicer.”
“Wasn’t it dangerous work—for _you_, I mean?”
“Yes, a trifle so, I suppose. But none of the inside men were on the
force. No one knew me there, from Adam. And it was worth it, too!”
“You mean, of course—?”
“I mean that a certain cable-splicer has the entrée to that conduit,
that he has a hand-made chart as to its wire-disposition, and—well,
several other things!”
He waited for some word of appreciative triumph from her. As she
remained silent, he went on again.
“And I mustn’t forget to tell you that I’ve leased a little basement
place not far from Pine Street. I’m going to do commercial printing and
that sort of thing. I’ve got a sign out, and the power all ready, only
my presses are slow in coming!”
“And will be still further delayed, I suppose?”
“Yes, I’m afraid they will.”
Some mysterious touch of his excitement at last communicated itself to
the listening woman, almost against her will. She was as fluctuant, she
told herself, as the aluminum needle of a quadrant electrometer. No, she
was more like the helpless little pith-ball of an electroscope, she
mentally amended, ever dangling back and forth in a melancholy conflict
of repulsion and attraction. Yet, as she comprehended Durkin’s plot,
point by point, she began to realize the vast possibilities that
confronted them, and, as ever before, to fall a victim to the zest of
action, the vital sting of responsibility. Nor did she allow herself to
lose sight of the care and minuteness of the continued artfulness and
finish, so teeming with its secondary æsthetic values, with which he had
reconnoitered his ever-menacing territory and laid his mine. And added
to this, she saw, was the zest of stalking the stalker: it carried with
it an ameliorating tang of dramatic irony, an uncouth touch of poetic
justice.
As often happened with her in moments of excitement, the expanded pupils
of her violet eyes crept over and all but blotted out the iris, until
out of the heavy shadows that hung under her full brow, they glowed
faintly, in certain lights, with an animal-like luminousness. “Those
eyes—they look as though a halo had melted and run down into them!”
Durkin had once cried, half wonderingly, half playfully, as he turned
her face from shadow to light and back to shadow again.
He had looked for some word of disapproval from her, for he could
remember how often, with her continuous scruples, she had taken the
razor-edge off his enthusiasm, when he stood on the brink of adventuring
with something big and momentous. So he studied her face abstractedly,
his own alight with an eager and predaceously alert look which only his
half-whimsical, half-boyish smile held above the plane of sheer vulpine
craftiness.
“Why, this man Curry,” he went on, still standing in front of her, “has
got such a grip on the market that he can simply juggle with it. Before
this boom you or I could buy a bale of cotton on a dollar margin. Today,
most of the brokerage houses insist on a four dollar margin, some of
them demanding a five, and it’s said that a ten dollar margin can still
be looked for.”
“But still, I don’t see how one man can do this, and keep it up!”
“It’s mostly all the natural outcome of his own, individual, long-headed
plot. Beyond that, it’s a mere infection, a mania, an operation of
mob-law, the case of sheep following a sheep. Curry, all along, is
crying out that the demand has outgrown the supply, and that the
commercial world has got to get used to the idea of twenty-cent cotton.
In the old days it used to sell away down around six cents, and ever
since then mills have been increasing their spindles,—in ten years,
Curry’s papers claim, the mills have added more than seventeen million
spindles to swell this tremendous cry for cotton. That’s his argument,
to tide him along until he kicks the post out, and the drop comes. Then
of course, he and the rest of his bull pool have been buying, buying,
buying, always openly and magnificently, yet all the while, selling
quietly and secretly.”
“And they call this legitimate business?” she demanded, with the
familiar tinge of scorn in her voice.
“Yes, they call it high finance. But it’s about as legitimate, on the
whole, as the pea and thimble game I used to watch up at the county
fairs in Canada. In other words, Frank, when we carry on our particular
line of business cleanly and decently, we are a hanged sight more honest
than these Exchange manipulators.”
“But not recognized!” she cut in, for she knew that with this unction of
comparison he was salving a still tender conscience.
“That’s because we are such small fry,” he went on heatedly. “But, by
heavens, when we get this thing going, I guess we’ll rather count a
little!”
“And what is to keep us from getting it going?”
He wheeled on her suddenly.
“One thing, and one hard thing!”
“Well?”
“Within twenty-four hours we have got to have ten thousand dollars!”