had been so well put into motion that the floor was doing for him his
deadly work of price-smashing. Telegraph wires were quivering from every
section of the United States to the tune of--"Sell--cut loose--throw
over!" A universal mania to get any price for anything was sweeping the
land like a conflagration. Tomorrow would bring those reflexes from
today when banks and trust companies from the Lakes to the Rio Grande
would topple in the wake of their metropolitan predecessors. Ruin sat
crowned and enthroned, monarch of the day and parent of a panic which
should close mills, and starve the poor and foster anarchy--but Hamilton
Burton's hand was nearer Edwardes' throat.

Staples and his twenty coöperators fought on doggedly, grimly, to turn
the tide before the close, but the nation was mad, and the men who
fought and clamored here in this pit of its bowels were the most violent
maniacs.

And while these things went forward Mary Burton still sat alone in the
private office of Jefferson Edwardes, waiting. Through century-long
hours she had in her ears only the din from the street and that
incessant ticking of the stock-tape at her elbow.

Every few minutes she rose and anxiously ran through her fingers the
long thin coil of paper which it fed so endlessly into its tall wicker
basket. She could make little of those abbreviated letters and numbers,
though she realized that every succeeding glance showed a shrinkage of
each value. One thing she could read with a deadly clarity--those
hideous words that meant the falling of the outposts. "So and So
announce that they cannot meet their obligations." There were other
grim scraps of information, too, wedged between the hurried quotations
such as, "Police reserves called to quell riot at closed North Bank,"