第84章

"If we've got to go down," he said to himself, "I'll see that it's a tremendous smash anyhow, and that we ain't alone in it."For he had in him the stuff that makes a man lead a forlorn hope with a certain joy in the very hopelessness of it.

The scene on the day of Dumont's downfall was a calm in comparison with the scene which Dumont, sitting alone among the piled-up coils of ticker-tape, was reconstructing from its, to him, vivid second-by-second sketchings.

The mysterious force which had produced a succession of earthquakes moved horribly on, still in mystery impenetrable, to produce a cataclysm.In the midst of the chaos two vast whirlpools formed--one where Great Lakes sucked down men and fortunes, the other where Woolens drew some down to destruction, flung others up to wealth.Then Rumor, released by Tavistock when Dumont saw that the crisis had arrived, ran hot foot through the Exchange, screaming into the ears of the brokers, shrieking through the telephones, howling over the telegraph wires, "Acorner! A corner! Great Lakes is cornered!" Thousands besides the Fanning-Smith coterie had been gambling in Great Lakes, had sold shares they did not have.And now all knew that to get them they must go to the unknown, but doubtless merciless, master-gambler--unless they could save themselves by instantly buying elsewhere before the steel jaws of the corner closed and clinched.

Reason fled, and self-control.The veneer of civilization was torn away to the last shred; and men, turned brute again, gave themselves up to the elemental passions of the brute.

In the quiet, beautiful room in upper Fifth Avenue was Dumont in his wine-colored wadded silk dressing-gown and white silk pajamas.The floor near his lounge was littered with the snake-like coils of ticker-tape.They rose almost to his knees as he sat and through telephone and ticker drank in the massacre of his making, glutted himself with the joy of the vengeance he was taking--on his enemies, on his false or feeble friends, on the fickle public that had trampled and spat upon him.His wet hair was hanging in strings upon his forehead.His face was flushed and his green-gray eyes gleamed like a mad dog's.At intervals a jeer or a grunt of gratified appetite ripped from his mouth or nose.Like a great lean spider he lay hid in the center of that vast net of electric wires, watching his prey writhe helpless.Pauline, made uneasy by his long isolation, opened his door and looked--glanced, rather.As she closed it, in haste to shut from view that spectacle of a hungry monster at its banquet of living flesh, Culver saw her face.Such an expression an angel might have, did it chance to glance down from the battlements of heaven and, before it could turn away, catch a glimpse of some orgy in hell.

But Dumont did not hear the door open and close.He was at the climax of his feast.

Upon his two maelstroms, sucking in the wreckage from a dozen other explosions as well as from those he had directly caused, he could see as well as if he were among the fascinated, horrified spectators in the galleries of the Exchange, the mangled flotsam whirling and descending and ascending.The entire stock list, the entire speculating public of the country was involved.And expression of the emotions everywhere was by telegraph and telephone concentrated in the one hall, upon the faces and bodies of those few hundred brokers.All the passions which love of wealth and dread of want breed in the human animal were there finding vent--all degrees and shades and modes of greed, of hate, of fear, of despair.It was like a shipwreck where the whole fleet is flung upon the reefs, and the sailors, drunk and insane, struggle with death each in his own awful way.It was like the rout where frenzied victors ride after and among frenzied vanquished to shoot and stab and saber.

And while this battle, precipitated by the passions of a few "captains of industry," raged in Wall Street and filled the nation with the clamor of ruined or triumphant gamblers, ten-score thousand toilers in the two great enterprises directly involved toiled tranquilly on--herding sheep and shearing them, weaving cloths and dyeing them, driving engines, handling freight, conducting trains, usefully busy, adding to the sum of human happiness, subtracting from the sum of human misery.

At three o'clock Dumont sank back among his cushions and pillows.

His child, his other self, his Woolens Monopoly, was again his own; his enemies were under his heel, as much so as those heaps and coils of ticker-tape he had been churning in his excitement.

"I'm dead tired," he muttered, his face ghastly, his body relaxed in utter exhaustion.

He closed his eyes."I must sleep--I've earned it.

To-morrow"--a smile flitted round his mouth--"I'll hang their hides where every coyote and vulture can see."Toward four o'clock in came Doctor Sackett and Culver.The room was flooded with light--the infinite light of the late-spring afternoon reflected on the white enamel and white brocade of walls and furniture.On the floor in the heaps and coils of ticker-tape lay Dumont.

In his struggles the tape had wound round and round his legs, his arms, his neck.It lay in a curling, coiling mat, like a serpent's head, upon his throat, where his hands clutched the collar of his pajamas.

Sackett knelt beside him, listening at his chest, feeling for his pulse in vain.And Culver stood by, staring stupidly at the now worthless instrument of his ambition for wealth and power.