“Do you imagine, sir,” he asked, “that securities will decline still further in value? If they should, I am afraid that I might find myself seriously involved. I can’t seem to understand this whole affair; I was led to believe—”
The big man, charmed with the novelty of having a genuine, voluntary listener, interrupted him at once.
“Oh, you don’t have to worry,” he said largely, “they might open ’em off a little lower, perhaps, but they’ll go back again. Don’t you fret; the country’s all right; they’ll come back; they always do.”
The little man seemed vastly comforted. “I’m very glad to hear you say so,” he answered. “It would come very hard—I had no idea the risk was so great—I was led to believe—”
The young man with the rumpled hair turned a trifle disgustedly to Carleton. “Heard from London?” he asked abruptly. His brief, and not wholly unintelligent connection with the game had led him to believe firmly in facts and figures, not in the dangerous pastime of theorizing over values, or speculating as to what the next move of the “big fellows” might be.
Carleton nodded. “Weak,” he answered, his tone pitched low and meant for his neighbor’s ear only, “horribly weak; and all sorts of stories starting, too; it looks as bad as it could.”
The young man nodded. “I supposed so,” he said, with resignation, and then added whimsically, “Well, there’s no use crying about it, I guess, but it certainly looks as if this was the time when little Willie gets it good and plenty, right in the neck.”
Just in front of them, a pale, slender man, with blinking eyes, and a mumbling, trembling mouth that was never still, talked steadily in an undertone, apparently partly to himself, partly to the man who stood at his shoulder, a red-faced farmer with a hundred shares of Akme at stake. “Now’d be the time,” he muttered, “now’d be the time to jump right in; jump right in and buy four or five thousand shares; a man could make a fortune, and get out for good; it’s the chance of a man’s life; to jump right in and buy four or five thousand shares.”
The countryman gazed at him in silence, sizing him up at first curiously, and then with a certain amused and not unkindly contempt. “Four or five thousand!” he said, at last. “That ain’t enough. Buy ten thousand while you’re at it. You’ll get twice as rich then,” but the nervous man seemed to take no offense, and indeed, not even to notice the remark. “Now’s the time,” he rambled on, and it was clear that it was to himself alone that his mumblings were addressed, “to jump right in; that’s the thing to do.”
To Carleton, all at once it seemed that the group around the ticker was a gathering merely of the wrecks of men—of idle fools of greater or less degree. All of them he pitied, except the big, coarse man with the toothpick, for whom he felt a huge dislike; and most of all his pity went out to the gentle man with the puzzled eyes; something unfair there seemed to be in such a one being decoyed into the market game—something repellant, as if one had lied, deliberately and maliciously, to a child. Pity or anger—old or young—was there in all the group, he reflected with sudden distaste, one real man? And then, instant and unexpected, a lightning flame of keenest irony seemed to sear its way into his very soul; suppose Farrington had withheld the check? Was there, in all the group, himself included, one real man—