at any cost of heart or nerve-tear a man must retain good form until the gong strikes.  Then, that he must be as near the uncaged tiger as human mind and body can be made.  Only I realised what volcano raged inside my chum’s bosom.  If any other man of the crowd had known, Bob’s chances of success would have been on par with a Canadian canoeist short-cutting Niagara for Buffalo.  Nine-tenths of the Stock Exchange game is not letting your left brain-lobe know what race your right is in until the winning numbers and the also-rans are on the board.  If one of those three hundred chain-lightning thinkers or any of their ten thousand alert associates knew in advance the intentions of a fellow broker, the word would sweep through that crowd with the sureness of uncorked ether, and the other two hundred and ninty nine, at gong-strike, would be at each others’ throats for his vitals, and before he knew the game had started would have his bones picked to a vulture-finish cleanness.  Suddenly, as I watched the scene, there rang through the great hall the first sharp stroke of the gong.  There were no echoes heard that morning.  The metallic voice was yet shaping its command to “at ’em, you fiends” when from three hundred throats burst the wild sound of the Stock Exchange yell.  No other sound in any of the open or hidden places of all nature duplicates the yell of a great Stock Exchange at an exciting opening.  It not only fills and refills space, for the volume is terrific, but it has an individuality all its own, coming from the incisive “take-mine-I’ve-got yours,” from the aggressive, almost arrogant “you-can’t-you-won’t-have-your-way,” the confident “by-heaven-I-will” individual notes that enter into the whole, as they blend with the shrill scream of triumph and the die-away note of disappointment, when the floor men realise their success or their failure.  I picked Bob’s magnificently resonant voice from the mass—­“40 for any part of 10,000 Sugar.”  It was this daring bid that struck terror to the bears and filled the bulls[2] with a frenzy of encouragement.  Again it rang out—­“45 for any part of 25,000”; and a third time—­“50 for any part of 50,000.”

The great crowd was surging all over the room.  Hats were smashed and coats were being stripped from their owners’ backs as though made of paper, and now and then a particularly frantic buyer or seller would be borne to the floor by the impetus of those who sought to fill his bid or grab his offer.  Through all the wild whirl, straight and erect and commanding was the form of Bob, his face cold and expressionless as an iceberg.  In five minutes the human mass had worked back to the Sugar-pole and there was the inevitable lull while its members “verified.”

I could see by the few entries Bob was making on his pad that he had been compelled to buy but little.  This meant that his campaign was working smoothly, that he was driving the market up by merely bidding, and that he had the greater part of my 50,000 yet unbought, which inturn meant he could continue to push up the price, or in the event of his opponents’ attempting to run it down, he would be under the market with big supporting orders.