There were thousands of men flying this way and that, wild-eyed and
shrieking. Van Rensselaer caught a phrase here and there,--"freight
rates--ruin them--the van Rensselaers--Shrike." And meanwhile he was
hurrying on his way to the board-room. He was a member and was admitted
to the bedlam, to the edge of that writhing, hysterical mass of men who
were crushing each other, breathless in their efforts to reach the
trading-post. Van Rensselaer gazed at the figure of the stock--it was
157! He heard the same exclamations here that he had heard
outside,--"freight rates--the van Rensselaers,"--and all the rest; and
then suddenly he saw near him a huge ox of a man, waving a paper in one
hand and bellowing in a voice that rang above the whole uproar. It was
one of van Rensselaer's own brokers, the best of them; and as van
Rensselaer heard him his heart stood still. The moment had come!
"I offer twenty thousand three-day sellers! T. & S. twenty
thousand!--one fifty-seven! one fifty-seven! Twenty thousand three-day
sellers--one fifty-six and seven-eighths! one fifty-six and
three-quarters!"
And then again the roar swelled up and drowned him. Men were screaming
from a hundred places: "One thousand at one fifty-six and a half!
Thirty-five hundred at one fifty-six! one fifty-six! one fifty-five and
a half!"
And van Rensselaer, mad, drunk, and blind with passion, shook his hands
in the air and screamed in frenzy, "Down! down with them! Down! Jump on
them! Pound them! _Go on! go on!_" He knew now that it was victory; he
could feel it in the air--the panic, the wild, raging, mad tornado that
uproots all things on its way. It had begun--it had begun! There were no
more takers--the enemy was retreating--the rout was on! And so he yelled
and laughed in delirium; and the crowd, crushed tightly about the post,
went mad likewise, with terror or joy, as the case might be. There were
men there who were losing a million with every point--the millions that
van Rensselaer was winning. And they saw defeat and ruin glaring at them
with fiery eyes. So they raged and screamed for some one to buy T. &
S.--to buy it at one fifty-six! to buy it at one fifty-five! to buy it
at one fifty-three! And there was no longer any one to buy it at any
price.
So it was that the hurricane burst, in all its fury; it was not a panic,
it was chaos and destruction let loose. The stock was "turned" at last;
its supporters beaten; and the public, the great terror-stricken public,
plunged in to overwhelm it. The price went no longer by fractions, no
longer even by points; it went by three points, by five points, by ten
points. Its speed was regulated by nothing but the time it took
electricity to spread the panic through the whole country, for messages
to come in bidding brokers to sell at any price. And in the meantime,
of course, there stood van Rensselaer's bull-voiced agent hammering it
down by five and by ten points at a bound with his twenty thousand
shares to sell.
The mad frenzy had gone on until van Rensselaer could no longer bear the
strain, and backed out of the crowd and sat down and laughed and sobbed
like an overwrought child. It was half an hour before he could command
himself again; and then T. & S. was at seventy-six, and finding takers
at last! That meant that the "shorts" were "covering," buying the stock
they needed, and reaping their rewards; and so the awful panic at last
was coming to an end. Van Rensselaer had estimated the true value of T.
& S. at ninety, and so he sought out his brokers and bade them buy all
there was to be had.