CHAPTER VI
THE STORM BREAKS
The morning came in a mist of dull gray clouds that clung in rings about the street lamps like the damp fog of a typical February thaw, yet it was the last day of October. Such weather was uncanny. It added to the strange feeling of impending calamity which had been hanging over the business world during the summer and had broken at last into the fierce storms of disaster of the past two weeks. Men who usually rose at nine o'clock were up at dawn. Some of them hadn't slept at all.
The more optimistic traders on the Stock Exchange expected to-day a change in the market. Stocks had declined for two weeks with appalling swiftness and fatality. Every hour had marked the ruin of men hitherto bulwarks of solidity. Experienced men reasoned and reasoned from experience that there must be a turn somewhere. The bottom surely had been reached. The time for a rally had come. Nine men out of every ten in the market at its close the night before expected the rally to begin at the stroke of the gong the next morning. The men who bought stocks in the closing hour were sure of this.
They rose to curse the weather. For the weather always affects speculation. Wall Street is superstitious. The proud intellect that struts the floor of the Exchange and scorns the powers of his feebler fellow-men carries secretly a horse chestnut in his pocket for luck. Without an exception all these great men believe in signs and wonders, in witches, palmists, spells and hoodoos.
Weather always gets on their nerves. Half the fluctuations of stocks under normal conditions of trade are purely the results of the mental states of the men who buy and sell.
The doctor rose early with a new hope filling his heart which no cloud could obscure. He watched Harriet pour his coffee at breakfast with his old-time smile of good cheer playing about his fine mouth.
Stuart was sleeping late. He was up until one o'clock writing a reply to a peculiarly venomous attack on his integrity which a morning paper had printed. The writer had boldly accused him of being the hired tool of the group of financial cut-throats who were coining millions out of the ruin of others in the destruction of public faith.
His reply was simple and his concluding paragraph was unanswerable, except by an epithet.