His judgment was gone; his brute instinct of fighting was dominant; he began to strike out wildly, his blows falling either nowhere or upon himself.
At the Woolens post he was buying in the effort to sustain its price, buying stock that might be worthless when he got it—and that he might not be able to pay for. At the Great Lakes post he was selling in the effort to force the price down, selling more and more of a stock he did not have and—— At last the thought flashed into his befuddled brain: "There may be a corner in Great Lakes. What if there were no stock to be had?"
He struck his hands against the sides of his head. "Trapped!" he groaned, then bellowed in Brackett's ear. "Sell Woolens—do the best you can to keep the price up, but sell at any price! We must have money—all we can get! And tell Farley"—Farley was Brackett's partner—"to buy Great Lakes—buy all he can get—at any price. Somebody's trying to corner us!"
He felt—with an instinct he could not question—that there was indeed a corner in Great Lakes, that he and his house and their associates were caught. Caught with promises to deliver thousands upon thousands of shares of Great Lakes, when Great Lakes could be had only of the mysterious cornerer, and at whatever price he might choose to ask!
"If we've got to go down," he said to himself, "I'll see that it's a tremendous smash anyhow, and that we ain't alone in it." For he had in him the stuff that makes a man lead a forlorn hope with a certain joy in the very hopelessness of it.
The scene on the day of Dumont's downfall was a calm in comparison with the scene which Dumont, sitting alone among the piled-up coils of ticker-tape, was reconstructing from its, to him, vivid second-by-second sketchings.
The mysterious force which had produced a succession of earthquakes moved horribly on, still in mystery impenetrable, to produce a cataclysm. In the midst of the chaos two vast whirlpools formed—one where Great Lakes sucked down men and fortunes, the other where Woolens drew some down to destruction, flung others up to wealth. Then Rumor, released by Tavistock when Dumont saw that the crisis had arrived, ran hot foot through the Exchange, screaming into the ears of the brokers, shrieking through the telephones, howling over the telegraph wires, "A corner! A corner! Great Lakes is cornered!" Thousands besides the Fanning-Smith coterie had been gambling in Great Lakes, had sold shares they did not have. And now all knew that to get them they must go to the unknown, but doubtless merciless, master-gambler—unless they could save themselves by instantly buying elsewhere before the steel jaws of the corner closed and clinched.
Reason fled, and self-control. The veneer of civilization was torn away to the last shred; and men, turned brute again, gave themselves up to the elemental passions of the brute.
In the quiet, beautiful room in upper Fifth Avenue was Dumont in his wine-colored wadded silk dressing-gown and white silk pajamas. The floor near his lounge was littered with the snake-like coils of ticker-tape. They rose almost to his knees as he sat and through telephone and ticker drank in the massacre of his making, glutted himself with the joy of the vengeance he was taking—on his enemies, on his false or feeble friends, on the fickle public that had trampled and spat upon him. His wet hair was hanging in strings upon his forehead. His face was flushed and his green-gray eyes gleamed like a mad dog's. At intervals a jeer or a grunt of gratified appetite ripped from his mouth or nose. Like a great lean spider he lay hid in the center of that vast net of electric wires, watching his prey writhe helpless. Pauline, made uneasy by his long isolation, opened his door and looked—glanced, rather. As she closed it, in haste to shut from view that spectacle of a hungry monster at its banquet of living flesh, Culver saw her face. Such an expression an angel might have, did it chance to glance down from the battlements of heaven and, before it could turn away, catch a glimpse of some orgy in hell.
But Dumont did not hear the door open and close. He was at the climax of his feast.