After each announcement, always, as in the past, when the gong had compelled silence, the crowd broke into an ominous “Aw, aw, aw.”
“Tighe & Company,” thought Cowperwood, for a single second, when he heard it. “There’s an end of him.” And then he returned to his task.
When the time for closing came, his coat torn, his collar twisted loose, his necktie ripped, his hat lost, he emerged sane, quiet, steady-mannered.
“Well, Ed,” he inquired, meeting his brother, “how’d you make out?” The latter was equally torn, scratched, exhausted.
“Christ,” he replied, tugging at his sleeves, “I never saw such a place as this. They almost tore my clothes off.”
“Buy any local street-railways?”
“About five thousand shares.”
“We’d better go down to Green’s,” Frank observed, referring to the lobby of the principal hotel. “We’re not through yet. There’ll be more trading there.”
He led the way to find Wingate and his brother Joe, and together they were off, figuring up some of the larger phases of their purchases and sales as they went.
And, as he predicted, the excitement did not end with the coming of the night. The crowd lingered in front of Jay Cooke & Co.’s on Third Street and in front of other institutions, waiting apparently for some development which would be favorable to them. For the initiated the center of debate and agitation was Green’s Hotel, where on the evening of the eighteenth the lobby and corridors were crowded with bankers, brokers, and speculators. The stock exchange had practically adjourned to that hotel en masse. What of the morrow? Who would be the next to fail? From whence would money be forthcoming? These were the topics from each mind and upon each tongue. From New York was coming momentarily more news of disaster. Over there banks and trust companies were falling like trees in a hurricane. Cowperwood in his perambulations, seeing what he could see and hearing what he could hear, reaching understandings which were against the rules of the exchange, but which were nevertheless in accord with what every other person was doing, saw about him men known to him as agents of Mollenhauer and Simpson, and congratulated himself that he would have something to collect from them before the week was over. He might not own a street-railway, but he would have the means to. He learned from hearsay, and information which had been received from New York and elsewhere, that things were as bad as they could be, and that there was no hope for those who expected a speedy return of normal conditions. No thought of retiring for the night entered until the last man was gone. It was then practically morning.