ease down, Blacklock?" he went on. "Everything's smooth. The
business--at least, my end of it, and I suppose your end, too--was never
better, never growing so fast. You could go off for a week or two, just as
well as not. I don't know of a thing that can prevent you."

And he honestly thought it, so little did I let him know about the larger
enterprises of Blacklock and Company. 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 and Company 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 rabbit. "How _did_ it happen?"

"Oh, I'll tell you sometime," replied I. "I must work now."

And work a-plenty there was. Before me rose a 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--their system of hiding behind cleverly-contrived
screens and slaughtering the decoyed public 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 happened to have more hypoc