Durkin, bending restlessly over his relay, and dreamily cogitating on
the newly discovered fact that Morse was a language as harmonious and
mysterious and subtly expressive as music itself, sat up with a sudden
galvanic jerk of the body.
“_Helen sails at one tomorrow!_” thrilled and warbled and sang the
little machine of dots and dashes; and the listening operator knew that
his time had come. He caught up the wires that ran through the gas-pipe
to the conduit, and bracing himself against the basement wall, pulled
with all his strength. They parted suddenly, somewhere near the cables,
and sent him sprawling noisily over the floor.
He hurriedly picked himself up, flung every tool and instrument that
remained in the dingy basement into his capacious club bag, and
carefully coiled and wrapped every foot of telltale wire. As little
evidence as possible, he decided, should remain behind him.
Five minutes later he stepped into Robinson & Little’s brokerage
offices. It was, in fact, just as the senior member of the firm was
slipping off his light covert-cloth overcoat and making ready for a
feverish day’s business.
Ezra Robinson stared a little hard when Durkin told him that he had
thirteen thousand dollars to throw into “short” cotton that morning, and
asked on what margin he would be able to do business.
“Well,” answered the broker, with his curt laugh, “it’s only on the
buying side that we’re demanding five dollars a bale _this_ morning!”
He looked at Durkin sharply. “You’re on the wrong side of the market,
young man!” he warned him.
“Perhaps,” said Durkin easily. “But I’m superstitious!”
The man of business eyed him almost impatiently.
Durkin laughed good-naturedly.
“I mean I had a sort of Joseph’s dream that cotton was going to break
down to sixteen today!”
“Well, you can’t afford to work on dreams. Cotton goes up to nineteen
today, and stays there. Candidly, I’d advise you to keep off the bear
side—for a month or two, anyway!”
But Durkin was not open to dissuasion.
“When May drops down to sixteen or so I’ll be ready to let the ‘shorts’
start to cover!” he argued mildly, as he placed his money, gave his
instructions, and carried away his all-important little slip of paper.
Then he hurried out, and dodged and twisted and ran through those
crowded and sunless cañons of business where only a narrow strip of
earth’s high-arching sky showed overhead. As he turned from William
Street into Hanover Square, through the second tier of half-opened plate
glass windows he could already hear the dull roar of the Cotton Pit. The
grim day’s business, he knew, was already under way.
Four policemen guarded the elevators leading to the spectator’s gallery.
The place was crowded to the doors; no more were to be admitted. Durkin,
however, pushed resolutely through the staggering mass, and elbowed and
twisted his way slowly up the stairs. Here again another row of guards
confronted him. A man at his side was excitedly explaining that the
Weather Bureau had just issued flood warnings, for danger line stages in
the lower Black Warrior of Alabama and the Chattahoochee of Georgia. And
_that_ ought to hold the “bears” back, the man declared, as Durkin
elbowed his way in to the guards.
“No use, mister, we can’t let you in,” said a perspiring officer.
He stood with his back to the closed door. At each entrance a
fellow-officer stood in the same position. The receipts at Bombay, for
the half-week, cried still another excited follower of the market, were
only thirty-eight thousands bales.
“Hey, stand back there! Let ’em out! Here’s a woman fainted!” came the
cry from within, and the doors were swung wide to allow the woman to be
carried through.
Durkin wedged a five-dollar bill down between the guarding policeman’s
fingers.
“There’s your chance. For God’s sake, get me in!”
The doors were already being closed, and the din within again shut off
from the listening crowd in the hallway.
“Here, stand back! Gentleman’s got a ticket!” and without further ado
the big officer cannonaded him into the midst of the gallery mob.
Once there, Durkin edged round by the wall, squeezed himself
unceremoniously out, until, at last, he came to the brass railing
guarding the edge of the spectator’s gallery. Then he took a deep
breath, and gazed down at the sea of commotion that boiled and eddied at
his feet.
It was one mad tumult of contending forces, a maelstrom of opposing
currents. Seldom was there a lull in that hundred-throated delirium,
where, on raised steps about a little circular brass railing, men
shouted and danced and flung up their hands and raced back and forth
through a swarming beehive of cotton-hunger. Some were hatless, some had
thrown coats and vests open, some white as paper, and some red and
perspiring; some were snowing handfuls of torn-up pad sheets over their
comrades, some were penciling madly in call-books, some were feverishly
handing slips to agile youths dodging in and out through the seething
mass. Every now and then a loud-noted signal-bell sounded from one end
of the hall, calling a messenger boy for despatches.
In the momentary little lulls of that human tempest Durkin could catch
the familiar pithy staccato of telegraph keys cluttering and pulsating
with their hurried orders and news. He could see the operators, where
they sat, apathetically pounding the brass, as unmoved as the youth at
the light-crowned, red-lined blackboard, who caught up the different
slips handed to him and methodically chalked down the calls under the
various months.
Then the tumult began afresh once more, and through it all Durkin could
hear the deep, bass, bull-like chest-notes of one trader rising loud
above all the others, answered from time to time by the clear, high,
penetratingly insistent and challenging soprano of another.
Curry once more had cotton on the upward move. It was rumored that the
ginners’ report was to be a sensational one. Despatches from Southern
points had shown advancing prices for spot cotton. A weak point had been
found in the Government report. All unpicked cotton on the flooding
Black Warrior bottoms would never reach a gin. The mills, it had been
whispered about, were still buying freely, eagerly; yet already
purchasers were having more difficulty in getting the commodity than
when, weeks before, it had stood two hundred points lower. And still the
sea of faces fought and howled and seethed, but still the price of
cotton went up.
Durkin searched more carefully through that writhing mass of frenzied
speculators for a glimpse of Curry himself.
He caught sight of him, at last, standing cool and collected and
rosy-faced, a few paces in front of the New Orleans blackboard, at the
edge of the little sea of frantic men that fought and surged and battled
at his side. Spot cotton had already soared to 17.55. The wires were
reporting it at eighteen cents in New Orleans. Hurry orders from
Liverpool were increasing the tension.
Durkin took a second and closer look at the great bull leader. He made
note of the large emerald flashing in his purple cravat, of the gaily
dotted white waistcoat, in the armholes of which were jauntily caught
the careless thumbs, of the black derby hat tilted a trifle down over
the careless, rosy face. This was the man who was so lavishly giving
away houses and jewels and automobiles. This was the man on whom men and
women in all walks of life, in every state and territory of the Union,
were pinning their faith for established twenty cent cotton and the balm
of affluence that it would bring them! This was the man at whose whisper
a hundred thousand spindles had ceased to revolve, and at whose nod, in
cotton towns half a world away, a thousand families either labored or
were idle, had food or went hungry.
A momentary lull came in the storm, a nervous spasm of uncertainty. It
seemed only a sheer caprice, but in sixty seconds the overstrained price
had fallen away again twenty points. Curry, stroking his small mustache,
stepped in closer to the circular brass railing of the Pit, and said a
quiet word or two to his head-broker. His rosy face was expressionless,
and he pulled languidly at his little mustache once more. But his motion
had started the upward tendency again. Both May and July cotton bounded
up, point by point, capriciously, unreasonably, inexorably, as though at
the wafting of a magician’s wand.
When the excitement seemed at its highest, when the shrill-noted chorus
of sellers and buyers was shrieking its loudest, Samuel Curry went out
to eat his luncheon. This was at once noticed and commented on,—for
dozens of eyes, both eager and haggard, watched the leader’s every move
and expression.
The change that swept over the Pit was magical. The tumult subsided. The
shouting men about the brass railing stopped to take breath. The
sallow-faced young man who chalked prices up on the Pit-edge blackboard
rested his tired fingers. Brokers sat about on little camp-stools. For
the first time Durkin could catch the sound of the sustained note of the
telegraph keys clicking busily away. The sunlight fell across the
paper-littered floor. The crowd in the gallery grew less. The operators
were joking and chatting. A messenger boy had fallen asleep on his
bench. The army was waiting for the return of its leader.
Curry re-entered the Pit quietly, with a toothpick in one corner of his
mouth. He stood there for a moment or two, his thumbs in his waistcoat
armholes, rocking comfortably back and forth on his heels, enigmatically
and indolently watching the floor which his reappearance had first
reanimated and then thrown into sudden confusion.
Durkin, in turn, watched the leader closely, breathlessly, waiting for
the beginning of the end. He saw Curry suddenly throw away his toothpick
and signal to a bent and pale-haired floor broker, who shot over to his
leader’s side, exchanged a whispered word or two with him, and then shot
back to the brass railing. There he flung his hands up in the air, with
fingers outthrust, and yelled like a madman:
“Buy July fifty-one! Buy July fifty-two! Buy July
fifty-three—four—five! Buy July fifty-six!”
That single-throated challenge was like a match to waiting ordnance.
With arms still extended and gaunt fingers outstretched he kept it up,
for one moment. Then the explosion came. Already, it seemed he had
imparted his madness to the men who screamed and fought and gesticulated
about him.
“Buy July sixty-three! Buy July sixty-four! Buy July
sixty-five—sixty-seven—sixty-eight!”
The frenzy in the Pit increased. Up, up went July cotton to seventy, to
seventy-one, even to seventy-two. In thirty years and over no such price
had ever been known. Eighty-five million dollars’ worth of cotton bales,
on paper, were deliriously exchanging hands. But, all things must reach
their end. The bow had been bent to the uttermost. The tide had flooded
into its highest point.
A sudden change came over Curry. He flung up his two hands, and brought
them smartly together over his jauntily tilted black derby. This done,
he elbowed and pushed his way hurriedly to the ring-side. The market
hung on his next breath.
“Sell twenty thousand May at sixty!”
A silence; like that which intervenes between the lightning flash and
the thunder-clap, fell in the Pit.
The leader was unloading. It was rumored that five thousand bales more
than the whole crop had been sold. The bubble had been overblown. There
was still time to be on the safe side. And like people fighting in a
fire-panic, they tore and trampled one another down, and blocked the way
to their own deliverance, through the very frenzy of their passion to
escape.
But the downward trend had already begun.
Everybody attempted to unload. Outside orders to follow the movement
promptly poured in. What before had been unrest was soon panic, and then
pandemonium. Men and youths bending over office tickers, women at quiet
home telephones, plungers and “occasionals” watching bulletin-boards,
miles and miles away—all took up the startled cry.
Wire-houses promptly heard of the unloading movement, of the abdication
of the bull king, and a mad stream of selling orders added to the rout
of the day.
Curry had started the current; he let it take its course. Through its
own great volume, he knew, it could easily carry all opposition down
with it. He even ostentatiously drew on his tan-colored gloves, and took
up his overcoat, as he announced, laughingly, that he was out of the
market, and that he was off to Florida for a holiday.
Then a second panic—frenzied, irrational, desperate, self-destroying
panic—took hold of that leaderless mob, trampling out their last hope
with their own feverish feet. Curry had liquidated his entire holdings!
He was going South for the winter! He was carrying out his old threat to
take the bears by the neck! He had caught the pool on the eve of
betraying him!
They had warned him that he would find no mercy if he did not draw in
with his manipulations. He had found treachery used against him, and as
he had promised, he was giving them a dose of their own medicine.
July, in the mad rush, dropped fifty points, then a ruinous one hundred
more, then wilted and withered down another fifty, until it stood 173
points below its highest quotation mark. The rout was absolute and
complete.
Seeing, of a sudden, that the market might even go utterly to pieces,
without hope of redemption, the old-time bull leader, now with a pallor
on his plump face, leaped into the Pit, and tried to hold the runaway
forces within bounds.
But his voice was lost in the din and tumult. He was a mere cork on the
grim tide of disaster. Even his own frantic efforts were in vain. The
_coup_ had been effected. The day had been won and lost!
Durkin did not wait for the gong to sound. He hurried round to Robinson
& Little’s offices, racing past disheveled men as excited as himself.
Neither member of the distraught firm of Robinson & Little was to be
seen. But a senior clerk, with a pale face and a wilted collar, quickly
and nonchalantly counted Durkin out his money, after verifying the slip,
and speaking a brief word or two with his master over the telephone.
When his brokerage commission had been deducted, Durkin was still able
to claim as his own some forty-eight thousand dollars.
It had been a game, for once, worth the candle.
He walked out into the afternoon sunlight, pausing a moment at the
doorway to drink in the clear wintry air of the open street. After all,
it was worth while to be alive in such a world, with all its stir, with
all its—
His line of thought was suddenly disrupted. A tingle of apprehension,
minute but immediate, was speeding up and down his backbone.
“That’s your man,” a voice had said from the shadow of the doorway.
Durkin took the two stones steps as one, and, without turning, hurried
on. His eyes were half-closed as he went, counting his own quick
footfalls and wondering how many of them might safely be taken to mean
escape.
He walked blindly, with no sense of direction, each moment demanding of
himself if it meant defeat or freedom.
At the twentieth step he felt a hand catch at the slack in his coat
sleeve. He jerked a startled and indignant arm forward, but the clutch
was one of steel.
“I guess we want you, Jimmie Durkin,” said a grim but genial and
altogether commonplace voice to him over his averted shoulder.
Then Durkin turned. It was Doogan’s plain-clothes man, O’Reilly. Beside
him stood a second plain-clothes man showing a corner of his Detective
Bureau badge.
“Well?” said Durkin, vacuously.
The men drew in closer, sandwiching him compactly between them. It was a
commonplace enough movement, but it made suddenly and keenly tangible to
his mind the fact that he had lost his freedom.
“For God’s sake, boys, whatever it is, don’t make a scene here!” cried
the prisoner, passionately. “I’ll go easy enough, but don’t make a show
of me.”
“Come on, then, quick!” said the Central Office plain-clothes man,
wheeling him about, and heading for the Old Slip Station.
“Quick as you like,” laughed Durkin, very easily but very warily, as he
calculated the time and distance between him and the sergeant’s desk,
and told himself a second time admonitively that he was indeed under
arrest.