owd as
possible, depended his "floor honour," perhaps his fortune, or, what was
more to him, his client's fortune. Nearly every man of them was a college
graduate who had won his spurs at athletics or a seasoned floor man whose
training had been even more severe than that of the college campus. When
it is known before the opening of the Exchange that there are to be
"things doing" in a certain stock, it is the rule to send only the picked
floor men into the crowd. There may be a fortune to make or to lose in a
minute or a sliver of a minute. For instance, the man who that morning was
able to snatch the first 5,000 shares sold at 140 could have resold them a
few minutes afterward at 152 and secured $60,000 profit. And the man who
was sent into the crowd by his client to sell 5,000 shares at the
"opening" and who got but 140, when the price would be 152 by the time he
reported to his customer, was a man to be pitied. Again, the trader who
the night before had decided that Sugar had gone up too fast, and who had
"shorted" (that is, sold what he did not have, with the intention of
repurchasing at a lower price than he sold it for) 5,000 shares at 140 and
who, finding himself in that surging mob with Sugar selling at 152, could
only get out by taking a loss of $60,000, or by taking another chance of
later paying 162--such a trader was also to be pitied.

No one who scanned the crowd that morning would have believed that the
calm, set face on that erect Indian figure, occupying the very centre of
that horde of gamblers who were only awaiting the ringing clang of the
gong to hurl themselves like madmen at each other, was the hysterical man
who the night before was wildly praying for this moment. Nearly every man
in that crowd was calm, but Bob Brownley was the calmest of them all. It's
the Exchange code that at any cost of heart or nerve-tear a man must
retain good form until the gong strikes. Then, that he must be as near the
uncaged tiger as human mind and body can be made. Only I realised what
volcano raged inside my chum's bosom. If any other man of the crowd had
known, Bob's chances of success would have been on par with a Canadian
canoeist short-cutting Niagara for Buffalo. Nine-tenths of the Stock
Exchange game is not letting your left brain-lobe know what race your
right is in until the winning numbers and the also-rans are on the board.
If one of those three hundred chain-lightning thinkers or any of their
ten thousand