CHAPTER XXIV
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.