Upon his two maelstroms, sucking in the wreckage from a dozen other explosions as well as from those he had directly caused, he could see as well as if he were among the fascinated, horrified spectators in the galleries of the Exchange, the mangled flotsam whirling and descending and ascending. The entire stock list, the entire speculating public of the country was involved. And expression of the emotions everywhere was by telegraph and telephone concentrated in the one hall, upon the faces and bodies of those few hundred brokers. All the passions which love of wealth and dread of want breed in the human animal were there finding vent—all degrees and shades and modes of greed, of hate, of fear, of despair. It was like a shipwreck where the whole fleet is flung upon the reefs, and the sailors, drunk and insane, struggle with death each in his own awful way. It was like the rout where frenzied victors ride after and among frenzied vanquished to shoot and stab and saber.
And while this battle, precipitated by the passions of a few "captains of industry," raged in Wall Street and filled the nation with the clamor of ruined or triumphant gamblers, ten-score thousand toilers in the two great enterprises directly involved toiled tranquilly on—herding sheep and shearing them, weaving cloths and dyeing them, driving engines, handling freight, conducting trains, usefully busy, adding to the sum of human happiness, subtracting from the sum of human misery.
At three o'clock Dumont sank back among his cushions and pillows. His child, his other self, his Woolens Monopoly, was again his own; his enemies were under his heel, as much so as those heaps and coils of ticker-tape he had been churning in his excitement. "I'm dead tired," he muttered, his face ghastly, his body relaxed in utter exhaustion.
He closed his eyes. "I must sleep—I've earned it. To-morrow"—a smile flitted round his mouth—"I'll hang their hides where every coyote and vulture can see."
Toward four o'clock in came Doctor Sackett and Culver. The room was flooded with light—the infinite light of the late-spring afternoon reflected on the white enamel and white brocade of walls and furniture. On the floor in the heaps and coils of ticker-tape lay Dumont.
In his struggles the tape had wound round and round his legs, his arms, his neck. It lay in a curling, coiling mat, like a serpent's head, upon his throat, where his hands clutched the collar of his pajamas.
Sackett knelt beside him, listening at his chest, feeling for his pulse in vain. And Culver stood by, staring stupidly at the now worthless instrument of his ambition for wealth and power.