offered. During the last thirty minutes it had become evident to all that
the boardroom traders and plungers, together with many of the
semi-professional gamblers, who operated through commission houses, were
selling out their long stock and going short over the opening of the Wall
Street hoodoo-day, Friday, the thirteenth of the month. But it was also
evident, with the heavy selling at the close and the stiffness of the
price, which had never wavered as block after block was thrown on the
market, that some powerful interest as well had taken cognisance of the
fact that the morrow was hoodoo-day. At the close, most of the sellers,
had they been granted another five minutes, would have repurchased, even
at a loss, what they had sold, for it looked as though they had sold
themselves into a trap. Their anxiety was intensified by the publication,
a few minutes later, of this item:

"Barry Conant in coming from the Sugar crowd after the close remarked
to a fellow broker, 'By three o'clock to-morrow, Friday, the 13th, will
have a new meaning to Wall Street.' This was interpreted as pointing to
a terrific jump in Sugar to-morrow."

"The Street" knew that the news bureau that sent out this item was
friendly to Barry Conant and the "System," and that it would print nothing
displeasing to them. Therefore, this must be, a foreword of the coming
harvest of the bulls and the slaughter of the bears.

Others than Ike Bloomstein remarked upon the fact that Bob Brownley had
hung close to the Sugar-pole all day, but when the close had come and gone
without his having anything to do with the Sugar skyrockets, he dropped
out of his fellow-brokers' minds. Wall Street has no use for any but the
"doer." The poet and the mooner would be no more secure from interruption
in the centre of the Sahara than in Wall Street between ten and three