anizer of
victory. So they fought down apprehension through four feverish days,
and minds grew calmer. On Saturday, though the ground beneath the
feet of Mr. Jeffrey yet rumbled now and then with Etna-mutterings of
disquiet, he deemed his task almost done. The market was firm, and
slowly advancing. Wall Street turned to its sleep of Sunday, worn out
but thankfully at peace.

In the first trading hour of Monday a hideous rumour flew round the
sixty acres of the financial district. It came into being as the
lightning comes--a blink that seems to begin nowhere; though it is to be
suspected that it was first whispered over the telephone--together with
an urgent selling order by some employee in the cable service. A sharp
spasm convulsed the convalescent share-list. In five minutes the dull
noise of the kerbstone market in Broad Street had leapt to a high note
of frantic interrogation. From within the hive of the Exchange itself
could be heard a droning hubbub of fear, and men rushed hatless in and
out. Was it true? asked every man; and every man replied, with trembling
lips, that it was a lie put out by some unscrupulous 'short' interest
seeking to cover itself. In another quarter of an hour news came of a
sudden and ruinous collapse of 'Yankees' in London at the close of
the Stock Exchange day. It was enough. New York had still four hours'
trading in front of her. The strategy of pointing to Manderson as the
saviour and warden of the markets had recoiled upon its authors with
annihilating force, and Jeffrey, his ear at his private telephone,
listened to the tale of disaster with a set jaw. The new Napoleon had
lost his Marengo. He saw the whole financial landscape sliding and
falling into chaos before him. In half an hour the news of the finding
of Manderson's body, with the inevitable rumour that it was suicide, was
printing in a dozen newspaper offices; but before a copy reached Wall
Street the tornado of the panic was in full fury, and Howard B. Jeffrey
and his collaborators were whirled away like leaves before its breath.

All this sprang out of nothing.

Nothing in the texture of the general life had changed. The corn had not
ceased to ripen in the sun. The rivers bore their barges and gave power
to a myriad engines. The flocks fattened on the pastures, the herds were
unnumbered. Men laboured everywhere in the various servitudes to which
they were born, and chafed not more than usual in their bonds. Bellona
tossed