onths Jack had stood at his desk new faces had filled
the chairs--the talk had varied; though he felt only the weary monotony
of it all. Sometimes there had been hours of tense excitement, when even
his uncle had stood by the ticker, and when every bankable security in
the box had been overhauled and sent post-haste to the bank or trust
company. Jack, followed by the porter with a self-cocking revolver in
his outside pocket, had more than once carried the securities himself,
returning to the office on the run with a small scrap of paper good
for half a million or so tucked away in his inside pocket. Then the old
monotony had returned with its dull routine and so had the chatter and
talk. "Buy me a hundred." "Yes, let 'em go." "No, I don't want to risk
it." "What's my balance?" "Thought you'd get another eighth for that
stock." "Sold at that figure, anyhow," etc.

Under these conditions life to a boy of Jack's provincial training and
temperament seemed narrowed down to an arm-chair, a black-board, a piece
of chalk and a restless little devil sputtering away in a glass case,
whose fiat meant happiness or misery. Only the tongue of the demon
was in evidence. The brain behind it, with its thousand slender nerves
quivering with the energy of the globe, Jack never saw, nor, for that
matter, did nine-tenths of the occupants of the chairs. To them its
spoken word was the dictum of fate. Success meant debts paid, a balance
in the bank, houses, horses, even yachts and estates--failure meant
obscurity and suffering. The turn of the roulette wheel or the roll of
a cube of ivory they well knew brought the same results, but these
turnings they also knew were attended with a certain loss of prestige.
Taking a flier in the Street was altogether different--great financiers
were behind the fluctuations of values told by the tongue of the ticker,
and behind them was the wealth of the Republic and still in the far
distance the power of the American people. Few of them ever looked below
the grease paint, nor did the most discerning ever detect the laugh on
the clown's face.

The boy half hidden by the glass screen, through which millions were
passed and repassed every month, caught now and then a glimpse.

Once a faded, white-haired old man had handed Jack a check after banking
hours to make good an account--a man whose face had haunted him for
hours. His uncle told him the poor fellow had "run up solid" against a
short interest in a stoc