pole all day, but when the close had come and gone
without his having anything to do with the Sugar skyrockets, he dropped
out of his fellow-brokers' minds. Wall Street has no use for any but the
"doer." The poet and the mooner would be no more secure from interruption
in the centre of the Sahara than in Wall Street between ten and three
o'clock. Some sage has said that the human mind, like the well-bucket, can
carry only its fill. The Wall Street mind always has its fill of budding
dollars. In consequence, there is never room for those other interests
that enter the normal mind.

Friday, the 13th of November, drifted over Manhattan Island in a drear
drizzle of marrow-chilling haze, which just missed being rain--one of
those New York days that give a hesitating suicide renewed courage to cut
the mortal coil. By ten o'clock it had settled down on the Stock Exchange
and its surrounding infernos with a clamminess that damped the spirits of
the most rampant bulls. No class in the world is so susceptible to
atmospheric conditions as stock-gamblers. Many a stout-hearted one has
been known to postpone the inauguration of a long-planned coup merely
because the air filled his blood with the dank chill of superstition.
Because of the expected Sugar pyrotechnics, Stock Exchange members had
gathered early; the brokers' offices were crowded to overflowing before
ten; the morning papers, not only in New York but in Boston, Philadelphia,
and other centres, were filled with stories of the big rise that was to
take place in Sugar. The knowing ones saw the ear-marks of the "System's"
press-agent in these stories; and they knew that this industrious
institution had not sat up the night before because of insomnia. All the
signs pointed to a killing, and a terrific one--pointed so plainly that
the bears and Sugar shorts found no hope in the atmosphere or the date.

Bob had not been near the office the afternoon before, and as he had not
come in by five minutes to ten I decided to go over to the Exchange and
see if he were going to mix up in the baiting of the Sugar bears. I had no
specific reasons for thinking he was interested except his recent queer
actions, particularly his hanging to the Sugar-pole, yet doing nothing,
the day before. But it is one of the best-established traditions of
stock-gambledom that when an operator has been bitten by a rabid
stock he is invariably attracted to it every time afterward that it
shows signs of frothi