Joe got to the office rather later than usual the next morning. They told him I was already there, but he wouldn’t believe it until he had come into my private den and with his own eyes had seen me. “Well, I’m jiggered!” said he. “It seems to have made less impression on you than it did on us. My missus and the little un wouldn’t let me go to bed till after two. They sat on and on, questioning me and discussing.”
I laughed—partly because I knew that Joe, like most men, was as full of gossip and as eager for it as a convalescent old maid, and that, whoever might have been the first at his house to make the break for bed, he was the last to leave off talking. But the chief reason for my laugh was that, just before he came in on me, I was almost pinching myself to see whether I was dreaming it all, and he had made me feel how vividly true it was.
“Why don’t you ease down, Blacklock?” he went on. “Everything’s smooth. The business—at least, my end of it, and I suppose your end, too—was never in better shape, never growing so fast. You could go off for a week or two, just as well as not.”
And he honestly thought it, so little did I let him know about the larger enterprises of Blacklock & Co. I could have spoken a dozen words, and he would have been floundering like a caught fish in a basket. There are men—a very few—who work more swiftly and more surely when they know they’re on the brink of ruin; but not Joe. One glimpse of our real National Coal account, and all my power over him couldn’t have kept him from showing the whole Street that Blacklock & Co. was shaky. And whenever the Street begins to think a man is shaky, he must be strong indeed to escape the fate of the wolf that stumbles as it runs with the pack.
“No holiday at present, Joe,” was my reply to his suggestion. “Perhaps the second week in July; but our marriage was so sudden that we haven’t had the time to get ready for a trip.”
“Yes—it was sudden, wasn’t it?” said Joe, curiosity twitching his nose like a dog’s at scent of a rat. “How did it happen?”
“Oh, I’ll tell you some time,” replied I. “I must go to work now.”
And work a-plenty there was. Before me rose a huge sheaf of clamorous telegrams from our out-of-town customers and our agents; and soon my anteroom was crowded with my local following, sore and shorn. I suppose a score or more of the habitual heavy plungers on my tips were ruined and hundreds of others were thousands and tens of thousands out of pocket. “Do you want me to talk to these people?” inquired Joe, with the kindly intention of giving me a chance to shift the unpleasant duty to him.
“Certainly not,” said I. “When the place is jammed, let me know. I’ll jack ’em up.”
It made Joe uneasy for me even to talk of using my “language”—he would have crawled from the Battery to Harlem to keep me from using it on him. So he silently left me alone. My system of dealing face to face with the speculating and investing public had many great advantages over that of all the other big operators—the system of decoying the public from behind cleverly contrived screens and slaughtering it without showing so much as the tip of a gun or nose that could be identified. But to my method there was a disadvantage that made men, who happen to have more hypocrisy and less nerve than I, shrink from it—when one of my tips miscarried, down upon me would swoop the bad losers in a body to give me a turbulent and interesting quarter of an hour.