The morning came in a mist of dull gray clouds that clung in rings about the street lamps like the damp fog of a typical February thaw, yet it was the last day of October. Such weather was uncanny. It added to the strange feeling of impending calamity which had been hanging over the business world during the summer and had broken at last into the fierce storms of disaster of the past two weeks. Men who usually rose at nine o\'clock were up at dawn. Some of them hadn\'t slept at all.
The more optimistic traders on the Stock Exchange expected to-day a change in the market. Stocks had declined for two weeks with appalling swiftness and fatality. Every hour had marked the ruin of men hitherto bulwarks of solidity. Experienced men reasoned and reasoned from experience that there must be a turn somewhere. The bottom surely had been reached. The time for a rally had come. Nine men out of every ten in the market at its close the night before expected the rally to begin at the stroke of the gong the next morning. The men who bought stocks in the closing hour were sure of this.
They rose to curse the weather. For the weather always affects speculation. Wall Street is superstitious. The proud intellect that struts the floor of the Exchange and scorns the powers of his feebler fellow-men carries secretly a horse chestnut in his pocket for luck. Without an exception all these great men believe in signs and wonders, in witches, palmists, spells and hoodoos.
Weather always gets on their nerves. Half the fluctuations of stocks under normal conditions of trade are purely the results of the mental states of the men who buy and sell.
The doctor rose early with a new hope filling his heart which no cloud could obscure. He watched Harriet pour his coffee at breakfast with his old-time smile of good cheer playing about his fine mouth.
Stuart was sleeping late. He was up until one o\'clock writing a reply to a peculiarly venomous attack on his integrity which a morning paper had printed. The writer had boldly accused him of being the hired tool of the group of financial cut-throats who were coining millions out of the ruin of others in the destruction of public faith.
His reply was simple and his concluding paragraph was unanswerable, except by an epithet.
"My business is the enforcement of justice. I am the servant of the people. If Wall Street can not stand the enforcement of law, so much the worse for the Street. It\'s no affair of mine. I didn\'t make the laws of the State any more than I made the law of gravitation. Nor did I write the Ten Commandments, but I have an abiding faith that they will stand when the last stone in the Stock Exchange building shall have crumbled into dust. I refuse to believe that the only way to save Wall Street is by a sworn officer of the law compounding a felony."
The doctor hurried down town to the office of a friend on Pine Street, an old-fashioned banker and broker whose name had always stood for honesty and fair dealing and conservative business. It was half an hour before the Stock Exchange opened but the dingy little office was packed with an excited crowd of customers. They all talked in low tones as if fearing the spirits of the air that hovered near. An eager group leaned over the bulletin from the London market. London was up half a point. The credulous were pleased. It was a good omen. The pessimists scoffed.
"Rigged from New York!" sneered a fat German the office boy had nicknamed the "Judge."
The doctor was struck with the curiously mottled crowd that jostled one another, waiting for the first cry of the opening quotations. Every walk and profession of life had its representative there—merchants, lawyers, doctors, clerks, clergymen, barbers, boot-blacks, retired capitalists and capitalists about to retire permanently.
The saddest group of all was in the adjoining room reserved for ladies. An opening through the partition wall allowed them to see the quotations as they were placed on the board around which the throng of jostling, smoking, perspiring men moved and stood. Most of these pale excited women with their hats awry and their hair disordered were the wives of solid business and professional men who wouldn\'t allow their husbands to know of their little venture into stocks for the world. They peeped through the opening occasionally and turned their backs quickly to avoid the gaze of the men.
But the most ominous figures were two or three "vultures" who stood grim and silent on the outer fringe of the moving crowd. Only one or two of the older ones recognized them.
The "Judge" saw them first.
"Ach, Gott, look at dem!" he exclaimed. "They never come except for carrion; they\'ve scented the dead. It\'s all over with us, poys!"
One of the most curious things in the history of Wall Street is the appearance of these vultures in a panic. They scent the final death-struggle with unerring accuracy. They never buy stocks except in those awful moments of ruin. They hold them grimly until the next tidal-wave of prosperity, sell out at the top, and wait patiently for the next killing. They are the only outsiders who ever make a dollar in Wall Street.
The doctor followed old Dugro, the head of the firm, into his private office and asked his advice. He got it—sharp, short and to the point.
"Go home, Doctor, and stay there. This market is no place for an amateur. It\'s all I can do to keep the wolf from my door in these days."
"But I\'ve received some important information."
"Keep it dark," old Dugro scowled. "Don\'t tell it to your worst enemy. If you\'ve got a dollar, nail it up and sleep on the box."
"But I\'ve some information I think I\'m going to act on and I want to open a small account with you."
"All right. I\'ve warned you," was the grim answer. "I wish you good luck."
The doctor drew his check for two thousand dollars and smilingly took his place among the crowd before the board. He was never surer of anything in his life than he was of Adam\'s sincerity. He prided himself on the fact that he was a judge of character. He was sure the cashier was wrong in his accounts; he was equally sure that the information he had received from Bivens\'s private secretary was accurate, provided, of course, the little weasel carried out the program he had mapped out.
The ticker would tell the story in the first hour. If stocks should sell off three points before noon, he would know. He determined to put this to the test first. He would not sell the market short. He would be content with the big jump the market would make upward when it started.
The ticker began its sharp metallic click.
The crowd stirred as if the electric shock had swept every nerve. A moment of breathless silence and the board boy leaning over the ticker shouted:
"Atch—92?!"
A groan, low, half-stifled, half-articulate came from the room and then a moment of silence followed.
"There, Gott," muttered the "Judge." "I kne............