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of debate and agitation was Green's Hotel, where on the evening of the eighteenth the lobby
and corridors were crowded with bankers, brokers, and speculators. The stock exchange had
practically adjourned to that hotel en masse. What of the morrow? Who would be the next to
fail? From whence would money be forthcoming? These were the topics from each mind and
upon each tongue. From New York was coming momentarily 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.
As he sat at his desk late that afternoon in his office looking out into Third Street, where a
hurrying of brokers, messengers, and anxious depositors still maintained, he had the feeling
that so far as Philadelphia and the life here was concerned, his day and its day with him was
over. He did not care anything about the brokerage business here any more or anywhere.
Failures such as this, and disasters such as the Chicago fire, that had overtaken him two years
before, had cured him of all love of the stock exchange and all feeling for Philadelphia. He had
been very unhappy here in spite of all his previous happiness; and his experience as a convict
had made, him, he could see quite plainly, unacceptable to the element with whom he had once
hoped to associate. There was nothing else to do, now that he had reestablished himself as a
Philadelphia business man and been pardoned for an offense which he hoped to make people
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