at Lakes. What if there were no stock to
be had?"

He struck his hands against the sides of his head. "Trapped!" he
groaned, then bellowed in Brackett's ear. "Sell Woolens--do the best
you can to keep the price up, but sell at any price! We must have
money--all we can get! And tell Farley"--Farley was Brackett's
partner--"to buy Great Lakes--buy all he can get--at any price.
Somebody's trying to corner us!"

He felt--with an instinct he could not question--that there was indeed
a corner in Great Lakes, that he and his house and their associates
were caught. Caught with promises to deliver thousands upon thousands
of shares of Great Lakes, when Great Lakes could be had only of the
mysterious cornerer, and at whatever price he might choose to ask!

"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, "A
corner! 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 dress