Dumont had ordered a general assault upon his enemies, front, rear and both flanks. His forces were now attacking not only through Great Lakes but also through Woolens. Two apparently opposing sets of his brokers were trading in Woolens, were hammering the price down, down, a point, an eighth, a half, a quarter, at a time. The sweat burst out all over Zabriskie's body and his eyes rolled wildly. He was caught among four fires: To continue to sell Great Lakes in face of its rising price--that was ruin. To cease to sell it and so let its price go up to where he could not buy when settlement time came--that was ruin. To sell Woolens, to help batter down its price, to shrink the value of his enormous investment in it--ruin again. To buy Woolens in order to hold up its price, to do it when he would need all obtainable cash to extricate him from the Great Lakes entanglement--ruin, certain ruin. His judgment was gone; his brute instinct of fighting was dominant; he began to strike out wildly, his blows falling either nowhere or upon himself. At the Woolens post he was buying in the effort to sustain its price, buying stock that might be worthless when he got it--and that he might not be able to pay for. At the Great Lakes post he was selling in the effort to force the price down, selling more and more of a stock he did not have and---- At last the thought flashed into his befuddled brain: "There may be a corner in Great Lakes. What if there were no stock to be had?" He struck his hands against the sides of his head. "Trapped!" he groaned, then bellowed in Brackett's ear. "Sell Woolens--do the best you can to keep the price up, but sell at any price! We must have money--all we can get! And tell Farley"--Farley was Brackett's partner--"to buy Great Lakes--buy all he can get--at any price. Somebody's trying to corner us!" He felt--with an instinct he could not question--that there was indeed a corner in Great Lakes, that he and his house and their associates were caught. Caught with promises to deliver thousands upon thousands of shares of Great Lakes, when Great Lakes could be had only of the mysterious cornerer, and at whatever price he might choose to ask! "If we've got to go down," he said to himself, "I'll see that it's a tremendous smash anyhow, and that we ain't alone in it." For he had in him the stuff that makes a man lead a forlorn hope with a certain joy in the very hopelessness of it. The scene on the day of Dumont's downfall was a calm in comparison with the scene which Dumont, sitting alone among the piled-up coils of ticker-tape, was reconstructing from its, to him, vivid second-by-second sketchings.