on. "Everything's
smooth. The business--at least, my end of it, and I suppose your end,
too--was never in better shape, never growing so fast. You could go
off for a week or two, just as well as not."

And he honestly thought it, so little did I let him know about the
larger enterprises of Blacklock & Co. I could have spoken a dozen
words, and he would have been floundering like a caught fish in a
basket. There are men--a very few--who work more swiftly and more
surely when they know they're on the brink of ruin; but not Joe. One
glimpse of our real National Coal account, and all my power over him
couldn't have kept him from showing the whole Street that Blacklock &
Co. was shaky. And whenever the Street begins to think a man is shaky,
he must be strong indeed to escape the fate of the wolf that stumbles
as it runs with the pack.

"No holiday at present, Joe," was my reply to his suggestion. "Perhaps
the second week in July; but our marriage was so sudden that we
haven't had the time to get ready for a trip."

"Yes--it _was_ sudden, wasn't it?" said Joe, curiosity twitching his
nose like a dog's at scent of a rat. "How did it happen?"

"Oh, I'll tell you some time," replied I. "I must go to work now."

And work a-plenty there was. Before me rose a huge sheaf of clamorous
telegrams from our out-of-town customers and our agents; and soon my
anteroom was crowded with my local following, sore and shorn. I
suppose a score or more of the habitual heavy plungers on my tips were
ruined and hundreds of others were thousands and tens of thousands out
of pocket. "Do you want me to talk to these people?" inquired Joe,
with the kindly intention of giving me a chance to shift the
unpleasant duty to him.

"Certainly not," said I. "When the place is jammed, let me know. I'll
jack 'em up."

It made Joe uneasy for me even to talk of using my "language"--he
would have crawled from the Battery to Harlem to keep me from using it
on him. So he silently left me alone. My system of dealing face to
face with the speculating and investing public had many great
advantages over that of all the other big operators--the system of
decoying the public from behind cleverly contrived screens and
slaughtering it without showing so much as the tip of a gun or nose
that could be identified. But to my method there was a disadvantage
that made men, who happen to have more hypocrisy and less nerve than
I, shrink from it--when one of my tips miscarri