Hear market is very weak. Please buy five thousand for me by way of support.
Wimperley read and handed it silently to Riggs. The little man swallowed a lump in his throat. "By God!" he said unsteadily, "but he's got sand, no doubt about it."
"What's that?" Stoughton demanded dully, and, reaching out, glanced at the telegram. "Why throw Robert Fisher to the wolves? They're doing well enough as it is," he grunted, and relapsed into a brooding silence.
Then began to arrive inquiries from country banks and cancellations from country subscribers. Wimperley read them out as they came in, and, well informed though he was of the wide distribution of Consolidated stock, experienced a slow amazement at the broad range of his followers. Their messages were indignant, despairing, threatening and pathetic. He began to wonder why he had accepted a responsibility which was now for the first time unveiled in such startling proportions. Yesterday the Consolidated was a name to conjure with. To-day it was an epitome of human fear and desperation.
Ten seconds before the noon gong struck on the Exchange, a frantic broker lifted a bull like voice above the uproar.
"Sell five thousand consol at thirty-two, thirty-two!" He bellowed it out raucously. The selling order had been flashed from Toronto.
"Taken at thirty-two," snapped Marsham's operator, who had opened the perilous game that morning, and, smiling, jotted a note on his cuff. He had made just eighty thousand dollars on that one transaction. The market strengthened a little in the afternoon on short covering, the matter of investment being thrown to the winds. Consolidated was now a gambling counter, and the closing quotation stood at thirty-five. Former values had shrunk by some eight millions. Gone was that laborious upbuilding into which Clark and the rest had thrown their very souls; overcast were the efforts of seven years. It was, to most people, a question of what might be made of what was left. The works remained, but, the public concluded, the iron and steel section, the heart of the thing, was unsound. Such is the communicable essence of fear.
At ten minutes after three the directors met to face a situation which was, in all truth, serious enough. Philadelphia banks, smarting from loans made on Consolidated stock, had declined further credit. The first payment of a million dollars for steel rails was indefinitely deferred. Creditors, galvanized by the events of the day, poured in ceaseless demands that their accounts be liquidated, but moneys due the Consolidated for pulp had been realized and diverted into the building of railways and the construction of the rail mill. Birch, his face very grave, ran over all this in a level monotone of a voice, while the rest wearily admitted its truth, and in the middle of the rehearsal a message was brought in from Clark.
Greatly regret events of to-day but am unshakenly confident for the future, given sufficient time to remedy defect in rails which should not take long. Chemical analyses show too high carbon and this can be rectified. Now awaiting remittance for payroll.
Wimperley read it without a trace of accentuation, while Stoughton got up and stared, as once before, at the sky line of Philadelphia.