“When we get out of this crowd,” said Ryan. Sponley made no further attempt to resist. He turned and walked quietly out of the pit. “Show me your warrant,” he repeated. He smiled as he read it, a dog’s smile that bared every tooth in his upper jaw. “Curtin, by God!” he said softly. Then he turned briskly to the detectives. “All right, I’ll go with you; only be quick. I’m in a hurry.” But he stopped involuntarily as the sudden roar that went up from the pit told him that trading had begun again. He knew that hurry would avail him nothing. For the first time in his life, the Bear tasted the bitterness of defeat. He was beaten; not, after all, by luck, and only secondarily by John Bagsbury. It was Nemesis that had overtaken him; or, to phrase it more modernly, the reflex action of the very force that had contributed so largely to his former successes. Had it been the other way about, they might have arrested Keyes without materially affecting the outcome of the struggle, for Keyes was, from half-past nine to half-past one, simply a machine for buying or for selling, as the case might be. But Melville Sponley had always been a visible incarnation of success. The men who had faced him all these years in the pit knew that he had never been beaten, and they had cherished the superstition, which he held himself, that he could not be beaten. During years on the Board of Trade--that place among all others where nothing should count but hard sense and telegraphic advices--no rumor had been so potent in bearing down the market as the report that Sponley was selling short. In this duel he fought with Pickering, reason was on the Bull side; the lard market was really narrow. Nearly all the traders who dabbled at all in provisions had sided with Sponley simply because he was Sponley. The small, visible supply of lard was an insignificant fact compared with that. So when the Bear, after reading the warrant, walked quietly away between the two detectives, there was blank dismay among his followers. Keyes was not the man to lose a golden moment like that one. He thrust his hands high in the air, his palms toward him, and every finger extended. His voice, as he shouted the new price, rang with defiant challenge for the men who had been giving his principal so terrible a drubbing. For a moment they made a show of resistance, and then their opposition melted away like a child’s fort of sand before the first rush of the tide. When the news came downstairs to Pickering, he was sitting on the table in Sievert’s private office. He said nothing to the head clerk, who congratulated him. He simply sat there open-mouthed, breathing fast, like a man who has just made a hundred-yard dash. He did not even wipe away the perspiration that gathered on his forehead and ran down into his eyes. He had not moved when John Bagsbury came into the room a few minutes later. “Here you are,” said the Banker. “Well, I guess this lets you out. It was cut pretty close, though.”