ith bankers,
brokers, and speculators. The stock exchange had practically adjourned
to that hotel en masse. What of the morrow? Who would be the next to
fail? From whence would money be forthcoming? These were the topics from
each mind and upon each tongue. From New York was coming momentarily
more news of disaster. Over there banks and trust companies were falling
like trees in a hurricane. Cowperwood in his perambulations, seeing what
he could see and hearing what he could hear, reaching understandings
which were against the rules of the exchange, but which were
nevertheless in accord with what every other person was doing, saw
about him men known to him as agents of Mollenhauer and Simpson, and
congratulated himself that he would have something to collect from them
before the week was over. He might not own a street-railway, but he
would have the means to. He learned from hearsay, and information which
had been received from New York and elsewhere, that things were as bad
as they could be, and that there was no hope for those who expected a
speedy return of normal conditions. No thought of retiring for the night
entered until the last man was gone. It was then practically morning.

The next day was Friday, and suggested many ominous things. Would it be
another Black Friday? Cowperwood was at his office before the street
was fairly awake. He figured out his program for the day to a nicety,
feeling strangely different from the way he had felt two years before
when the conditions were not dissimilar. Yesterday, in spite of the
sudden onslaught, he had made one hundred and fifty thousand dollars,
and he expected to make as much, if not more, to-day. There was no
telling what he could make, he thought, if he could only keep his small
organization in perfect trim and get his assistants to follow his orders
exactly. Ruin for others began early with the suspension of Fisk &
Hatch, Jay Cooke's faithful lieutenants during the Civil War. They had
calls upon them for one million five hundred thousand dollars in the
first fifteen minutes after opening the doors, and at once closed them
again, the failure being ascribed to Collis P. Huntington's Central
Pacific Railroad and the Chesapeake & Ohio. There was a long-continued
run on the Fidelity Trust Company. News of these facts, and of failures
in New York posted on 'change, strengthened the cause Cowperwood was so
much interested in; for he was selling as high as he could and buyin