"I'll be there."
Ten minutes later I was in Whitney's head-quarters. There pandemonium reigned; all the cocksureness and bluster of the "machine" had vanished, and it was a horde of clamorous and excited men I found struggling round Towle and Whitney, who vainly sought to stay the panic. It was not disappointment at the governor's message that had so stirred these hardened practitioners of politics, but the terror of impending loss. The majority of the Whitney band, lawyers, lieutenants, and water-carriers had bought one stock or both on margin, and had assured their friends it was safe to plunge to the limit.
On earth there is no more pitiable sight than the panic of a herd of novice stock-speculators suddenly awakened to a realization of their ruin. The ticker clicks a sort of death-watch as the merciless tape, without hitch or let up, reels off destruction. To such desperate beings the stock operator—the market-maker—is the straw to save them from drowning, and to him they turn as the one possible source of aid and hope. I only knew these men at sight's end, but they knew me and were sure in their abject plight that I could help them—by what wizardry they never stopped to think. They were terribly certain that unless the market turned, their brokers must have additional margin or their stock would be thrown overboard, sinking prices still lower and bringing down their friends' stock, and so on, like a row of falling bricks.
From their comfortable viewpoint of out-of-temptation virtue, my readers may regard these lawyers, lieutenants, and water-carriers of Whitney as bad men, deserving of no sympathy, meeting here a righteous punishment; but, my word for it—and I know the world and the human ants and spiders who inhabit it—while they bore no marks of immorality, they were the average men one meets in one's journey over the bridge between the two unknowns.
My talk with Whitney and Towle was brief and pointed. It was no time for pow-wow. It was the moment for action. Men who do things in stock-markets never waste time over milk that is in the gutter. How to get new milk to replace that spilt is their care.
"What are you going to do, Mr. Whitney?" I asked.
George Towle started to explain. I stopped him.
"The market is bad," I said, talking quickly. "If time is dribbled, it will be worse, and—and Boston will be a warm place for you, Towle. It would not surprise me if it got warm even for Mr. Whitney, when the desperate men who are filling the brokerage shops and the corridors outside demand a reason why they were egged on to buy stocks on Mr. Whitney's word that the governor would sign. No excuses now; I want to know from Mr. Whitney just what he proposes to do. You both told me the legislative end was none of my business, and, thank Heaven, it was not. You said it was your business. Now, how about it?"
Henry M. Whitney is a great general. He also can light his cigar, when the battle's on, with the friction of a passing cannon-ball.