The Cost Part 38

In Wall Street there is a fatuity which, always epidemic among the small fry, infects wise and foolish, great and small, whenever a paretic dream of an enormous haul at a single cast of the net happens to come true. This paretic fatuity now had possession of James; in imagination he was crowning and draping himself with multi-millions, power and fame. At intervals he had been calling up on the telephone at his elbow Zabriskie, the firm's representative on 'Change, and had been spurring him on to larger and more frequent "sales" of Great Lakes.

His telephone bell rang. He took down the receiver--"Yes, it's Mr.

Fanning-Smith--oh--Mr. Fanshaw----" He listened, in his face for the first few seconds all the pitying amus.e.m.e.nt a small, vain man can put into an expression of superiority. "Thank you, Mr. Fanshaw," he said.

"But really, it's impossible. WE are perfectly secure. No one would venture to disturb US." And he pursed his lips and swelled his fat cheeks in the look for which his father was noted. But, after listening a few seconds longer, his eyes had in them the beginnings of timidity.

He turned his head so that he could see the ticker-tape as it reeled off. His heavy cheeks slowly relaxed. "Yes, yes," he said hurriedly.

"I'll just speak to our Mr. Zabriskie. Good-by." And he rang off and had his telephone connected with the telephone Zabriskie was using at the Stock Exchange. All the while his eyes were on the ticker-tape.

Suddenly he saw upon it where it was bending from under the turning wheel a figure that made him drop the receiver and seize it in both his trembling hands. "Great heavens!" he gasped. "Fanshaw may be right.

Great Lakes one hundred and twelve--and only a moment ago it was one hundred and three."

His visions of wealth and power and fame were whisking off in a gale of terror. A new quotation was coming from under the wheel--Great Lakes one hundred and fifteen. In his eyes stared the awful thought that was raging in his brain--"This may mean----" And his vanity instantly thrust out Herron and Gertrude and pointed at them as the criminals who would be responsible if--he did not dare formulate the possibilities of that bounding price.

The telephone boy at the other end, going in search of Zabriskie, left the receiver off the hook and the door of the booth open. Into Fanning-Smith's ear came the tumult from the floor of the Exchange--shrieks and yells riding a roar like the breakers of an infernal sea. And on the ticker-tape James was reading the story of the cause, was reading how his Great Lakes venture was caught in those breakers, was rushing upon the rocks amid the despairing wails of its crew, the triumphant jeers of the wreckers on sh.o.r.e. Great Lakes one hundred and eighteen--tick--tick--tick--Great Lakes one hundred and twenty-three--tick--tick--tick--Great Lakes one hundred and thirty--tick--tick--tick--Great Lakes one hundred and thirty-five--

"It can't be true!" he moaned. "It CAN'T be true! If it is I'm ruined--all of us ruined!"

The roar in the receiver lessened--some one had entered the booth at the other end and had closed the door. "Well!" he heard in a sharp, impatient voice--Zabriskie's.

"What is it, Ned--what's the matter? Why didn't you tell me?"

Fanning-Smith's voice was like the shrill shriek of a coward in a perilous storm. It was in itself complete explanation of Zabriskie's neglect to call upon him for orders.

"Don't ask me. Somebody's rocketing Great Lakes--taking all offerings.

Don't keep me here. I'm having a hard enough time, watching this crazy market and sending our orders by the roundabout way. Got anything to suggest?"

Tick--tick--tick--Commander-in-chief Fanning-Smith watched the crawling tape in fascinated horror--Great Lakes one hundred and thirty-eight.

It had spelled out for him another letter of that hideous word, Ruin.

All the moisture of his body seemed to be on the outside; inside, he was dry and hot as a desert. If the price went no higher, if it did not come down, nearly all he had in the world would be needed to settle his "short" contracts. For he would have to deliver at one hundred and seven, more than two hundred thousand shares which he had contracted to sell; and to get them for delivery he would have to pay one hundred and thirty-eight dollars a share. A net loss of more than six millions!

"You must get that price down--you must! You MUST!" quavered James.

"h.e.l.l!" exclaimed Zabriskie--he was the youngest member of the firm, a son of James' oldest sister. "Tell me how, and I'll do it."

"You're there--you know what to do," pleaded James. "And I order you to get that price down!"

"Don't keep me here, talking rot. I've been fighting--and I'm going to keep on."

James shivered. Fighting! There was no fight in him--all his life he had got everything without fighting. "Do your best," he said. "I'm very ill to-day. I'm--"

"Good-by--" Zabriskie had hung up the receiver.

James sat staring at the tape like a paralytic staring at death. The minutes lengthened into an hour--into two hours. No one disturbed him--when the battle is on who thinks of the "honorary commander"? At one o'clock he shook himself, brushed his hand over his eyes--quotations of Woolens were reeling off the tape, alternating with quotations of Great Lakes.

"Zabriskie is selling our Woolens," he thought. Then, with a blinding flash the truth struck through his brain. He gave a loud cry between a sob and a shriek and, flinging his arms at full length upon his desk, buried his face between them and burst into tears.

"Ruined! Ruined! Ruined!" And his shoulders, his whole body, shook like a child in a paroxysm.

A long, long ring at the telephone. Fanning-Smith, irritated by the insistent jingling so close to his ear, lifted himself and answered--the tears were guttering his swollen face; his lips and eyelids were twitching.

"Well?" he said feebly.

"We've got 'em on the run," came the reply in Zabriskie's voice, jubilant now.

"Who?"

"Don't know who--whoever was trying to squeeze us. I had to throw over some Woolens--but I'll pick it up again--maybe to-day."

Fanning-Smith could hear the roar of the Exchange--wilder, fiercer than three hours before, but music to him now. He looked sheepishly at the portrait of his grandfather. When its eyes met his he flushed and shifted his gaze guiltily. "Must have been something I ate for breakfast," he muttered to the portrait and to himself in apologetic explanation of his breakdown.

In a distant part of the field all this time was posted the commander-in-chief of the army of attack. Like all wise commanders in all well-conducted battles, he was far removed from the blinding smoke, from the distracting confusion. He had placed himself where he could hear, see, instantly direct, without being disturbed by trifling reverse or success, by unimportant rumors to vast proportions blown.

To play his game for dominion or destruction John Dumont had had himself arrayed in a wine-colored, wadded silk dressing-gown over his white silk pajamas and had stretched himself on a divan in his sitting-room in his palace. A telephone and a stock-ticker within easy reach were his field-gla.s.ses and his aides--the stock-ticker would show him second by second the precise posture of the battle; the telephone would enable him to direct it to the minutest manoeuver.

The telephone led to the ear of his chief of staff, Tavistock, who was at his desk in his privatest office in the Mills Building, about him telephones straight to the ears of the division commanders. None of these knew who was his commander; indeed, none knew that there was to be a battle or, after the battle was on, that they were part of one of its two contending armies. They would blindly obey orders, ignorant who was aiming the guns they fired and at whom those guns were aimed.

Such conditions would have been fatal to the barbaric struggles for supremacy which ambition has waged through all the past; they are ideal conditions for these modern conflicts of the market which more and more absorb the ambitions of men. Instead of shot and sh.e.l.l and regiments of "cannon food," there are battalions of capital, the paper certificates of the stored-up toil or trickery of men; instead of mangled bodies and dead, there are minds in the torment of financial peril or numb with the despair of financial ruin. But the stakes are the same old stakes--power and glory and wealth for a few, thousands on thousands dragged or cozened into the battle in whose victory they share scantily, if at all, although they bear its heaviest losses on both sides.

It was half-past eight o'clock when Dumont put the receiver to his ear and greeted Tavistock in a strong, cheerful voice. "Never felt better in my life," was his answer to Tavistock's inquiry as to his health.

"Even old Sackett admits I'm in condition. But he says I must have no irritations--so, be careful to carry out orders."

He felt as well as he said. His body seemed the better for its rest and purification, for its long freedom from his occasional but terrific a.s.saults upon it, for having got rid of the superfluous flesh which had been swelling and weighting it.

He made Tavistock repeat all the orders he had given him, to a.s.sure himself he had not been misunderstood. As he listened to the rehearsal of his own shrewd plans his eyes sparkled. "I'll bag the last----of them," he muttered, and his lips twisted into a smile at which Culver winced.

When the ticker clicked the first quotation of Great Lakes Dumont said: "Now, clear out, Culver! And shut the door after you, and let no one interrupt me until I call." He wished to have no restraint upon his thoughts, no eyes to watch his face, no ears to hear what the fortune of the battle might wring from him.

As the ticker pushed out the news of the early declines and recoveries in Great Lakes, Tavistock leading the Fanning-Smith crowd on to make heavier and heavier plunges, Dumont could see in imagination the battle-field--the floor of the Stock Exchange--as plainly as if he were there.

The battle began with a languid cannonade between the two seemingly opposed parts of Dumont's army. Under cover of this he captured most of the available actual shares of Great Lakes--valuable aids toward making his position, his "corner," impregnable. But before he had accomplished his full purpose Zabriskie, nominal lieutenant-commander, actual commander of the Fanning-Smith forces, advanced to give battle.

Instead of becoming suspicious at the steadiness of the price under his attacks upon it, Zabriskie was lured on to sell more of those Great Lakes shares which he did not have. And he beamed from his masked position as he thought of the batteries he was holding in reserve for his grand movement to batter down the price of the stock late in the day, and capture these backers of the property that was supposed to be under the protection of the high and honorable Fanning-Smiths.

He was still thinking along this line, as he stood aloof and apparently disinterested, when Dumont began to close in upon him. Zabriskie, astonished by this sudden tremendous fire, was alarmed when under its protection the price advanced. He a.s.saulted in force with large selling orders; but the price pushed on and the fierce cannonade of larger and larger buying orders kept up. When Great Lakes had mounted in a dozen bounds from one hundred and seven to one hundred and thirty-nine, he for the first time realized that he was facing not an unorganized speculating public but a compact army, directed by a single mind to a single purpose. "A lunatic--a lot of lunatics," he said, having not the faintest suspicion of the reason for the creation of these conditions of frenzy. Still, if this rise continued or was not reversed the Fanning-Smiths would be ruined--by whom? "Some of those Chicago bluffers," he finally decided. "I must throw a scare into I them."

He could have withdrawn from the battle then with a pitiful remnant of the Fanning-Smiths and their a.s.sociates--that is, he thought he could, for he did not dream of the existence of the "corner." But he chose the opposite course. He flung off his disguise and boldly attacked the stock with selling orders openly in the name of the Fanning-Smiths.

"When they see us apparently unloading our own ancestral property I think they'll take to their heels," he said. But his face was pale as he awaited the effect of his a.s.sault.

The price staggered, trembled. The clamor of the battle alarmed those in the galleries of the Stock Exchange--Zabriskie's brokers selling, the brokers of the mysterious speculator buying, the speculating public through its brokers joining in on either side; men shrieking into each other's faces as they danced round and round the Great Lakes pillar.

The price went down, went up, went down, down, down--Zabriskie had hurled selling orders for nearly fifty thousand shares at it and Dumont had commanded his guns to cease firing. He did not dare take any more offerings; he had reached the end of the ammunition he had planned to expend at that particular stage of the battle.

The alarm spread and, although Zabriskie ceased selling, the price continued to fall under the a.s.saults of the speculating public, mad to get rid of that which its own best friends were so eagerly and so frankly throwing over. Down, down, down to one hundred and twenty, to one hundred and ten, to one hundred and five----

Zabriskie telephoned victory to his nominal commander, lifting him, weak and trembling, from the depths into which he had fallen, to an at least upright position upon his embossed leather throne. Then Zabriskie began stealthily to cover his appallingly long line of "shorts" by making purchases at the lowest obtainable prices--one hundred and four--one hundred and three--one hundred and one--ninety-nine--one hundred and six!

The price rebounded so rapidly and so high that Zabriskie was forced to stop his retreat. Dumont, noting the celerity with which the enemy were escaping under cover of the demoralization, had decided no longer to delay the move for which he had saved himself. He had suddenly exploded under the falling price mine after mine of buying orders that blew it skyward. Zabriskie's retreat was cut off.

But before he had time to reason out this savage renewal of the a.s.sault by that mysterious foe whom he thought he had routed, he saw a new and more dreadful peril. Brackett, his firm's secret broker, rushed to him and, to make himself heard through the hurly-burly, shouted into his ear: