"The report?" he asked faintly.
"They got it!" admitted Smith, who did not seem deeply downcast at its loss. "But they didn't get you, my boy! So that I think we may regard their job as a failure."
CHAPTER IX
INTRODUCING T. B. SMITH
In the month of May the market, that unfailing barometer of public nerves, moved slowly in an upward direction.
If the "House" was jubilant, the "Street" was no less gratified, for since the "Baggin Failure" and financial cataclysm, which dragged down the little investors to ruin, there had been a sad flatness in the world of shares. There are many places of public resort where the "Street" people meet—those speculators who daily, year in and out, promenade the pavement of Throgmorton Street, buying and selling on an "eighth" margin.
To them, from time to time, come the bare-headed clerks with news of this or that rise or fall, to receive instructions gravely imparted, and as gravely accepted, and to retire to the mysterious deeps of the "House" to execute their commissions.
The market was rising, steadily as the waters of a river rise; that was the most pleasant knowledge of all. It did not jump or leap or flare; it progressed by sixteenths, by thirty-seconds, by sixty-fourths; but all down the money columns in the financial papers of the press were tiny little plus marks which brought joy to the small investor, who is by nature a "bull."
Many people who are not directly interested in finance regarded the signs with sympathy. The slaves of the street, 'busmen, cabmen, the sellers of clamorous little financial papers, all these partook in the general cheeriness.
Slowly, slowly climbed the market.