CHAPTER XVI
“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!”