Between death and life, success and failure, what a hair's-breadth after all. If Vinal had stubbed his toe, or had been able to take the first cab he found; if he had heard my call which would have brought him back; if he had tarried a moment longer in the Young Men's Christian Association where he had stopped to deliver a message, he would have escaped. The thought did not occur to me at the moment, for Vinal's death was too keen a personal sorrow to allow me to estimate my own narrow escape, but if that envelope, so miraculously preserved, had been burned as were the other papers in my secretary's pocket, there might have been no Amalgamated. "Coppers" must have dropped back to the lowly place from which Rogers had lifted them, for I should have been financially ruined.
To show the marvelous workings of Him who tempers the wind to the shorn lamb: At the same moment that I was called away from my guns, the commanding general of the opposing forces received the same call. The aged mother of the President of the Boston & Montana and Butte & Boston, while riding in her carriage, had been a victim of the same explosion.
FOOTNOTES:
[19] "The Street" is a general term used to designate the stock operators, the fraternity in New York being known as Wall Street, in Boston as State Street, and in Philadelphia as Broad Street; these streets are the centre of the financial districts of their respective cities, the Stock Exchanges being situated on them.
CHAPTER XII
THE BUNCOING OF THE STOCKHOLDERS OF UTAH
This was veritably a period of financial delirium in Boston. No one talked or thought of aught but "Coppers," at least no one with a spare dollar or good credit. The air was full of mysterious yarns and the Stock Exchange was hung with Aladdin lamps. From every nook and corner of State Street, from the chinks between its sedate old cobblestones, came forth copper-mines—mines undreamt of before and unheard of since. Innumerable devices were rigged to take advantage of the prevailing intoxication. The prices of the strong properties leaped up with breath-taking rapidity. The copper epidemic spread over New England and began to extend in constantly widening circles through the rest of the country, while from England, France, and Germany came daily news of symptoms which proved that the infection had crossed the ocean. I, with my hands full, kept two secretaries busy shooing away industrious promoters who came at me in armies with old and new copper properties, which I might have on my own or any old terms.
In the midst of this excitement I had my first real demonstration of the "System's" method of making dollars from nothing. Well as I thought I knew the stock game, I'll admit that I looked on open-mouthed, like the veriest novice, at the magic wrought by the simple use of the name "Standard Oil." Even now I can hear myself as I gasped: "Heaven help the people if this sort of thing can be done in America, for Heaven alone has power to help them."