The price of Con. Steel declined faster and faster as the volume of selling-orders grew larger. It was the snowball rolling down the hillside. From sixty-eight it went to sixty-seven; to sixty-six; to sixty-five by fractions. Then it broke whole points at a time--to sixty; to fifty-five! In fifteen frightful, unforgetable minutes the capital stock, of the Consolidated Steel Corporation shrank in value fifteen million dollars--one million a minute! A psychological statistician would have figured that this million a minute was the tribute of the moneyed world to the great Garrettson's reputation for financial invulnerability; it was the cost of the blow to his prestige, the result of his partners' inefficiency during the one crucial moment of the firm's existence. The partners would have understood death and could have provided against it, stock-marketwise. It is likely that they even might have capitalized their senior partner's demise had it come from typhoid, tuberculosis, or taxicab. But the disappearance of the great Garrettson, the fatal incertitude, the black ignorance, the fearing and the hoping, paralyzed the faculties of the junior partners of Wall Street's mighty firm. And the costliness of their indecision was raised into the millions by the fact that, just as Jenkins, Johnson, and Lane, the junior partners, agreed that Garrettson, though absent, was well, and were about to take steps to check the gamblers' panic, the telephone summoned Jenkins. “Hello! Is this Mr. Jenkins? Good. This is Dr. Pierson. Come at once to Mr. Garrettson, Hotel Cressline, Suite D. No, not B--D! Say nothing to the family! Hurry!” And the speaker rang off. His face livid with apprehension, visibly tortured by the still unrelieved uncertainty, Jenkins turned to Walter Johnson, the youngest and--Wall Street said--the cleverest of Garrettson's partners, and repeated the message. “Was it Dr. Pierson's voice?” asked Johnson. “I don't know--yes; I think it was. He said, 'This is Dr. Pierson,' and I didn't suspect--yes; I think it was.” After a second's pause, “I know it was Pierson!” “Then, for Heaven's sake--” began Lane. “Your knowledge of Pierson's voice, Jenkins, is vitiated by your obvious wish. Call up Dr. Pierson's office, of course!” said Johnson. “Meantime we are losing precious time--” Johnson had already gone to the desk telephone and asked for Dr. Pierson's office. To his partner he said, the receiver at his ear: