"Would it not be well to let the subscribers have more than the amount we agreed? Why not take more of this money than five millions?"
This was out of a clear sky, for there had not been the slightest suggestion of a change of programme and I had rested in the certainty that our plan insured the safety of all who had gone in on my say-so. I choked down my excitement.
"Good God, Mr. Rogers, are you mad?" I exclaimed. "Don't let us depart a hair from what we all in our cool moments decided was best. We are in the field now. It would be sure ruin to try any new schemes at this moment."
"You are rattled yourself, Lawson. There's no need for excitement. I merely offered the suggestion. Everything is going well," he reassured me, but the picture his words conjured before my mind disturbed me all day. That he would dare do what he had suggested I did not credit, for the assurances I had were too solemn to allow me to believe such treachery could be meditated. Nevertheless I brooded over the matter, and late in the afternoon ran down to 26 Broadway, ostensibly to hear the latest news from the bank, but really to try if I could not look into Mr. Rogers' head and see if the imps I had sighted early in the day were still there.
Mr. Rogers was over with Stillman at the bank. In half an hour he came in, and the excitement he labored under was plainly evident in his face.
"Lawson," he said, "no one has ever seen anything like this before. Stillman is bewildered. He says it looks as though by to-morrow there will be a mob around the bank doors, and if between now and then anything unusual should happen, there'll be the devil to pay sure. I tell you I'm so tired out that I'm going home now to rest up."
Together we went uptown on the Elevated, and when I left him at Thirty-third Street to cross over to my hotel, somehow the dark forebodings of the morning had been lulled by his frank geniality and carried away by his enthusiastic rejoicings in the success of our enterprise. The picture of that soft spring evening hangs in my memory's gallery—the declining sun seen through a long perspective of gilded brick and brownstone façades, the heavy rumble of trains, the clamor of newsboys crying last editions, the packed cable-cars slowly threading their way amid the hurrying crowds of clerks and shop girls streaming homeward, the cabs swinging in and out of the throng, through whose windows I caught glimpses of jewels on bare shoulders, light silks, and sweeping plumes—the butterflies of fashion or folly hurrying out on their evening trysts. Broadway, with its hundreds of sights and sounds, was before me in the hour of its transformation, the street lamps breaking into incandescence, and the huge electric signs beginning to glare above the theatre entrances. By the time I reached the Waldorf, that high abode of Yankee royalty, the kinks and curlicues were so far ironed from my nerves and brain that I had little doubt of my ability to take a fall out of Fate in whatever sort of collar-and-elbow tussle she might designate. In this mood I swung into the huge hotel through the carriage entrance on Thirty-fourth Street, eager to forget myself amid the rapt concourse of dollar worshippers, preening themselves against the plush, onyx, and gildings of the Astor caravansary. I seemed to see in the mirrors, on the walls, on the buttons of the lackeys' livery, in the patterns of the rugs, inscribed on the tessellated floors and painted on the lofty ceilings, dazzling and glittering, the universal crest of the twisted S with its two upright bars.
Dollars, dollars, dollars.
Through the office I pushed, my path disputed by the hosts of Crœsus in ambush for market information. Colonels and generals of the almighty-dollar army were on either flank of me, and the air was thick with the echo and the rumor of millions. At last I found myself in the high and splendid room, with its tall windows elaborately curtained with velvet, its floor space studded with small tables, where after four o'clock any afternoon, the year round, you will find the active Wall Street contingent busily discussing the day's doings and plotting good or evil for the morrow. There they all were, that eventful evening, in parties of seven or eight clustered at the little tables, and as I entered a vigorous hail caught my ear and again I found myself surrounded.
"Sit down a minute, Lawson," said ex-Congressman Jefferson M. Levy—"Jeff Levy" in Wall Street—"and tell us about Amalgamated. I suppose there's not a chance to get what one wants unless one subscribes for five or ten times more than one needs, but if you say that's straight, I'll put in another subscription for ——."