A number of times during the following year, and finally on the anniversary of the Sands tragedy, Bob carried the Exchange to the verge of panic, only to turn the market and save “the Street” in the end.  His profits were fabulous.  Already his fortune was estimated to be between two and three hundred millions, one of the largest in the world.  His name had become one of terror wherever stocks were dealt in.  Wall Street had come to regard his every deal, from the moment that he began operations, as inevitably successful.  Now and again he would jump into the market when some of the plunging cliques had a bear raid under way, and would put them to rout by buying everything in sight and bidding up prices until it looked as though he intended to do as extraordinary work on the up-side as he was wont to do on the down.  At such times he was the idol of the Exchange, which worships the man who puts prices up as it hates him who pulls them down.  Once when war news flashed over the wires from Washington and rumour had the Cabinet members, Senators, and Congressmen selling the market short on advance information, when the “Standard Oil” banks had put up money rates to 150 per cent, and a crash seemed inevitable, Bob suddenly smashed the loan market by offering to lend one hundred millions at four per cent.; and by buying and bidding up prices at the same time, he put the whole Washington crowd and its New York accomplices to disastrous rout and caused them to lose millions.  He continued his operations with increasing violence and increasing profits up to the fourth anniversary of the tragedy.  On the intervening anniversary I had been compelled by self-interest and fear that he would really pull down the entire Wall Street structure, to rush in and fairly drag him off.  But with his growing madness my influence was waning.  Each raid it was with greater difficulty that I got his ear.

Finally, on the fourth anniversary, in a panic that seemed to be running into something more terrible than any previous, he savagely refused to accede to my appeal, telling me that he would not stop, even if Randolph & Randolph were doomed to go down in the crash.  It had become known on the floor that I was the only one who could do anything with him in his frenzies, and my pleading with him in the lobby was watched by the members of the Exchange with triple eyed suspense.  When it was clear from his emphatic gestures and raised voice—­for he was in a reckless mood from drink and madness and took no pains to disguise his intentions—­that I could not prevail upon him, there was a frantic rush for the poles to throw over stocks in advance of him.  Suddenly, after I had turned from him in despair, there flashed into my mind an idea.  The situation was desperate.  I was dealing with a madman, and I decided that I was justified in making this last try.  I rushed back to him.  “Bob, good-bye,” I whispered in his ear, “good-bye.  In ten minutes you will get word that Jim Randolph has cut his throat!” He stopped as though I had plunged a knife into him, struck his forehead a resounding blow, and into his wild brown eyes came a sickening look of fear.