Between death and life, success and failure, what a hair's-breadth after
all. If Vinal had stubbed his toe, or had been able to take the first
cab he found; if he had heard my call which would have brought him back;
if he had tarried a moment longer in the Young Men's Christian
Association where he had stopped to deliver a message, he would have
escaped. The thought did not occur to me at the moment, for Vinal's
death was too keen a personal sorrow to allow me to estimate my own
narrow escape, but if that envelope, so miraculously preserved, had been
burned as were the other papers in my secretary's pocket, there might
have been no Amalgamated. "Coppers" must have dropped back to the lowly
place from which Rogers had lifted them, for I should have been
financially ruined.

To show the marvelous workings of Him who tempers the wind to the shorn
lamb: At the same moment that I was called away from my guns, the
commanding general of the opposing forces received the same call. The
aged mother of the President of the Boston & Montana and Butte & Boston,
while riding in her carriage, had been a victim of the same explosion.

FOOTNOTES:

[19] "The Street" is a general term used to designate the stock operators,
the fraternity in New York being known as Wall Street, in Boston as State
Street, and in Philadelphia as Broad Street; these streets are the centre
of the financial districts of their respective cities, the Stock Exchanges
being situated on them.

CHAPTER XII

THE BUNCOING OF THE STOCKHOLDERS OF UTAH

This was veritably a period of financial delirium in Boston. No one
talked or thought of aught but "Coppers," at least no one with a spare
dollar or good credit. The air was full of mysterious yarns and the
Stock Exchange was hung with Aladdin lamps. From every nook and corner
of State Street, from the chinks between its sedate old cobblestones,
came forth copper-mines--mines undreamt of before and unheard of since.
Innumerable devices were rigged to take advantage of the prevailing
intoxication. The prices of the strong properties leaped up with
breath-taking rapidity. The copper epidemic spread over New England and
began to extend in constantly widening circles through the rest of the
country, while from England, France, and Germany came daily news of
symptoms which proved that the infection had crossed the ocean. I, with
my hands full, kept two secretaries busy shooing away industrious
promoters who came