Yet only two men knew and understood just how this Napoleon of commerce was to abandon and leave to its own blind fate this great, uncomprehending, maddened army of followers. Speculators who had made their first money in following at his heels were putting not only their winnings, but all their original capital, and often that of others, on the “long” side of the great bull movement, waiting, always waiting, for that ever alluring Fata Morgana of twenty cent cotton. Even warier spirits, suburban toilers, sober-minded mechanics, humble store-traders, who had long regarded ’Change as a very Golgotha of extortion and disaster, had been tainted with the mysterious psychologic infection, which had raced from city to town and from town to hamlet. Men bowed before a new faith and a new creed, and that faith and creed lay compactly in three pregnant words: Twenty Cent Cotton. Yet this magnetic and spectacular bull leader, Durkin felt, was infinitely wiser and craftier than any of those he led. Curry, at heart, knew and saw the utter hopelessness of his cause; he realized that he was only toying and trifling with a great current that in the end, when its moment came, would sweep him and his followers away like so many chips. He faced and foresaw this calamity, and out of the calamity which no touch of romanticism in his nature veiled to his eyes, he quietly prepared to reap his harvest. As these thoughts ran through Durkin’s busy mind, some vague idea of the power which reposed in his own knowledge of how great the current was to become, and just what turn it was to take, once more awakened in him. He had none of that romantic taint, he prided himself, which somewhere or at some time invariably confused the judgment of the gambler and the habitual criminal—for they, after all, he often felt, were in one way essentially poets in spirit, though dreamers grown sour through stagnation. Yet he could see, in the present case, how gigantic his opportunities were. Properly equipped, with a very meagre sum, millions lay before him, inevitably. But the stain of illegitimacy clung to his methods, and as it was, his returns at best could be only a paltry few thousands—fifty or sixty or even a hundred thousand at most. With Curry it would be millions. Durkin remembered his frugal train-despatching days at the barren little wooden station at Komoka Junction, where forty dollars a month had seemed a fortune to him. He lighted a Carolina Perfecto, and inhaled it slowly and deliberately, demanding to know why he ought not to be satisfied with himself. In those earlier days he used to eat his dinner out of a tin pail, carried each morning from his bald and squalid boarding-house. Today, he remembered, he was to take luncheon with Frances at the Casa Napoleon, with its exquisite Franco-Spanish cookery, its tubbed palms, and its general air of exotic well-being.