of a giant.  His arms, with their fate-pointing fingers, rose and fell with bewildering rapidity as his piercing voice rang out—­“5,000 at 69, 68, 65,” “10,000 at 63,” “25,000 at 60.”  Pandemonium reigned.  Every man in the crowd seemed to have the capital stock of the Sugar Trust to sell, and at any price.  A score seemed to be bent on selling as low as possible instead of for as much as they could get.  These were the shorts who had been punished the day before by Bob’s uplift.

Poor Bob, he was forgotten!  An instant after he made his last effort he was the dead cock in the pit.  Frenzied gamblers of the Stock Exchange have no more use for the dead cocks than have Mexicans for the real birds when they get the fatal gaff.  The day after the contest, or even that same night at Delmonico’s and the clubs, these men would moan for poor Bob; Barry Conant’s moan would be the loudest of them all, and, what is more, it would be sincere.  But on battle day away to the dump with the fallen bird, the bird that could not win!  I saw a look of deep, terrible agony spread over Bob’s face; and then in a flash he was the Bob Brownley who I always boasted had the courage and the brain to do the right thing in all circumstances.  To the astonishment of every man in the crowd he let loose one wild yell, a cross between the war-whoop of an Indian and the bay of a deep-lunged hound regaining a lost scent.  Then he began to throw over Sugar stock, right and left, in big and little amounts.  He slaughtered the price, under-cutting Barry Conant’s every offer and filling every bid.  For twenty minutes he was a madman, then he stopped.  Sugar was falling rapidly to the price it finally reached, 90, and the panic was in full swing, but panics seemed now to have no interest for Bob.  He pushed his way through the crowd and, joining me, said:  “Jim, forgive me.  I have dragged you into an enormous loss, have ruined Beulah Sands, her father, and myself.  I think at the last moment I did the only thing possible.  I threw over the 150,000 shares and so cut off some of our loss.  Let us go to the office and see where we stand.”  He was strangely, unnaturally calm after that heart-crushing, nerve-tearing day.  I tried to tell him how I admired his cool nerve and pluck in about-facing and doing the only thing there was left to do; to tell him that required more real courage and level-headedness than all the rest of the day’s doings; but he stopped me: 

“Jim, don’t talk to me.  My conceit is gone.  I have learned my lesson to-day.  My plans were all right, and sound, but poor fool that I was, I did not take into consideration the loaded dice of the master thieves.  I knew what they could do, have seen them scores of times, as you have, at their slaughter; seen them crush out the hearts of other men just as good as you or I; seen them take them out and skin and quarter-slice them, unmindful of the agony of those who were dear to and dependent on their owners, but it never seemed to strike me