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 buying as low as he could on a constantly sinking scale.  By twelve o’clock he figured with his assistants that he had cleared one hundred thousand dollars; and by three o’clock he had two hundred thousand dollars more.  That afternoon between three and seven he spent adjusting his trades, and between seven and one in the morning, without anything to eat, in gathering as much additional information as he could and laying his plans for the future.  Saturday morning came, and he repeated his performance of the day before, following it up with adjustments on Sunday and heavy trading on Monday.  By Monday afternoon at three o’clock he figured that, all losses and uncertainties to one side, he was once more a millionaire, and that now his future lay clear and straight before him.