believing they could sell it out to him at a slightly higher price. The
professional traders were, of course, keen students of psychology; and
their success depended on their ability to guess whether or not a broker
representing a big manipulator, like Tighe, had an order large enough
to affect the market sufficiently to give them an opportunity to "get
in and out," as they termed it, at a profit before he had completed the
execution of his order. They were like hawks watching for an opportunity
to snatch their prey from under the very claws of their opponents.

Four, five, ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, and sometimes
the whole company would attempt to take advantage of the given rise of
a given stock by either selling or offering to buy, in which case the
activity and the noise would become deafening. Given groups might
be trading in different things; but the large majority of them would
abandon what they were doing in order to take advantage of a speciality.
The eagerness of certain young brokers or clerks to discover all that
was going on, and to take advantage of any given rise or fall, made
for quick physical action, darting to and fro, the excited elevation of
explanatory fingers. Distorted faces were shoved over shoulders or
under arms. The most ridiculous grimaces were purposely or unconsciously
indulged in. At times there were situations in which some individual was
fairly smothered with arms, faces, shoulders, crowded toward him when
he manifested any intention of either buying or selling at a
profitable rate. At first it seemed quite a wonderful thing to young
Cowperwood--the very physical face of it--for he liked human presence
and activity; but a little later the sense of the thing as a picture or
a dramatic situation, of which he was a part faded, and he came down to
a clearer sense of the intricacies of the problem before him. Buying
and selling stocks, as he soon learned, was an art, a subtlety, almost a
psychic emotion. Suspicion, intuition, feeling--these were the things to