第69章

The lot round the corner from his place was not built upon; and there, in the side street, was a rapidly swelling crowd, the camera-bearers hastily putting their instruments in position, the black cloths fluttering like palls or pirate flags.With a roaring howl he released his hold upon the ladder and shook both fists, his swollen face blazing between them.He tottered, fell backward, crashed upon the stone flooring of the area.His head struck with a crack that made the women-servants scream.The men lifted him and carried him into the house.He was not stunned;he tried to stand.But he staggered back into the arms of his valet and his butler.

"Brandy!" he gasped.

He took a third drink--and became unconscious.When the doctor arrived he was raving in a high fever.For years he had drunk to excess--but theretofore only when HE chose, never when his appetite chose, never when his affairs needed a clear brain.Now appetite, long lying in wait for him, had found him helpless in the clutches of rage and fear, and had stolen away his mind.

The news was telephoned to the office at half-past eleven o'clock."It doesn't matter," said Giddings."He'd only make things worse if he were to come now."Giddings was apparently right.From a tower of strength, supporting alone, yet with ease, National Woolens, and the vast structure based upon it, Dumont had crumbled into an obstruction and a weakness.There is an abysmal difference between everybody knowing a thing privately and everybody knowing precisely the same thing publicly.In that newspaper exposure there was no fact of importance that was not known to the entire Street, to his chief supporters in his great syndicate of ranches, railroads, factories, steamship lines and selling agencies.But the tremendous blare of publicity acted like Joshua's horns at Jericho.The solid walls of his public reputation tottered, toppled, fell flat.

There had been a tight money-market for two weeks.Though there had been uneasiness as to all the small and many of the large "industrials," belief in National Woolens and in the stability of John Dumont had remained strong.But of all the cowards that stand sentinel for capital, the most craven is Confidence.At the deafening crash of the fall of Dumont's private character, Confidence girded its loins and tightened its vocal cords to be in readiness for a shrieking flight.

Dumont ruled, through a parent and central corporation, the National Woolens Company, which held a majority of the stock in each of the seventeen corporations constituting the trust.His control was in part through ownership of Woolens stock but chiefly through proxies sent him by thousands of small stock-holders because they had confidence in his abilities.To wrest control from him it was necessary for the raiders both to make him "unload" his own holdings of stock and to impair his reputation so that his supporters would desert him or stand aloof.

On the previous day National Woolens closed at eighty-two for the preferred and thirty-nine for the common.In the first hour of the day of the raid Giddings and the other members of Dumont's supporting group of financiers were able to keep it fairly steady at about five points below the closing price of the previous day, by buying all that was offered--the early offerings were large, but not overwhelming.The supporters of other industrials saw that the assault on Woolens was a menace to their stocks--if a strong industrial weakened, the weaker ones would inevitably suffer disaster in the frightened market that would surely result.They showed a disposition to rally to the support of the Dumont stocks.

At eleven o'clock Giddings began to hope that the raid was a failure, if indeed it had been a real raid.At eleven-twenty Herron played his trump card.

The National Industrial Bank is the huge barometer to which both speculative and investing Wall Street looks for guidance.Whom that bank protects is as safe as was the medieval fugitive who laid hold of the altar in the sanctuary; whom that bank frowns upon in the hour of stress is lost indeed if he have so much as a pin's-point area of heel that is vulnerable.Melville, president of the National Industrial, was a fanatically religious man, with as keen a nose for heretics as for rotten spots in collateral.