The blue-black eyes gave a flash of genuine surprise. “Decker!” he exclaimed. Then his eyes fell, and he paused a moment before replying in his high inflexible voice. “He might be.” “Is he after Omega, or is he just bracing up the market?” “Excuse me,” said Eppner with the cold reflection of an apologetic tone, “but we never advise customers. Are you walking over to the Exchange?” In the Exchange all was excitement, and the first call brought a roar of struggling brokers. I could make nothing of the clamor, but my nearest neighbor shouted in my ear: “A strong market!” “It looks that way,” I shouted back. It certainly was strong in noise. I made out at last that prices were being held to the figures of the morning's session, and in some cases were forced above them. The excitement grew as the call approached Omega. There was an electric tension in the air that told of the anxious hopes and fears that centered in the coming struggle. The stock was called at last, and I looked for a roar that would shake the building and a scene of riot on the floor that would surpass anything I had witnessed yet. It failed to come. There was almost a pause in the proceedings. I caught a glimpse of Doddridge Knapp across the room, looking on with a grim smile on the wolf jaws and an apparently impassive interest in the scene. I marveled at his coolness when his fortune, perhaps, turned on the events of the next five minutes. He gave no sign, nor once looked in my direction. The clamor on the floor began and swelled in volume, and a breath of visible relief passed over the anxious assembly. Wallbridge and Eppner made a dive at once for a yelling broker, and a cold chill ran down my back. I saw then that I had set my brokers bidding against each other for the same stock. “Great Mammon!” I thought. “If Doddridge Knapp ever finds it out, what a circus there will be!” “She's going up!” said my neighbor with a shout of joy. He owned none of the stock, but like the rest of the populace he was a bull on principle. I nodded with a dubious attempt to imitate his signs of satisfaction. Forty-five--forty-seven--fifty-five--it was going up by leaps. I blessed the forethought that had suggested to me to put a limit on Wallbridge and stop the competition between my agents at fifty. The contest grew warmer. I could follow with difficulty the course of the proceedings, but I knew that Omega was bounding upward. The call closed amid animation; but the excitement was nothing compared to the scene that had followed the fall in the morning. Omega stood at eighty asked, and seventy-eight bid, and the ship of the stock gamblers was again sailing on an even keel. Some hundreds had been washed overboard, but there were thousands left, and nobody foresaw the day when the market would take the fashion of a storm-swept hulk, with only a chance survivor clinging here and there to the wreckage and exchanging tales of the magnificence that once existed.