ing-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 tran