Four policemen guarded the elevators leading to the spectator’s gallery. The place was crowded to the doors; no more were to be admitted. Durkin, however, pushed resolutely through the staggering mass, and elbowed and twisted his way slowly up the stairs. Here again another row of guards confronted him. A man at his side was excitedly explaining that the Weather Bureau had just issued flood warnings, for danger line stages in the lower Black Warrior of Alabama and the Chattahoochee of Georgia. And _that_ ought to hold the “bears” back, the man declared, as Durkin elbowed his way in to the guards. “No use, mister, we can’t let you in,” said a perspiring officer. He stood with his back to the closed door. At each entrance a fellow-officer stood in the same position. The receipts at Bombay, for the half-week, cried still another excited follower of the market, were only thirty-eight thousands bales. “Hey, stand back there! Let ’em out! Here’s a woman fainted!” came the cry from within, and the doors were swung wide to allow the woman to be carried through. Durkin wedged a five-dollar bill down between the guarding policeman’s fingers. “There’s your chance. For God’s sake, get me in!” The doors were already being closed, and the din within again shut off from the listening crowd in the hallway. “Here, stand back! Gentleman’s got a ticket!” and without further ado the big officer cannonaded him into the midst of the gallery mob. Once there, Durkin edged round by the wall, squeezed himself unceremoniously out, until, at last, he came to the brass railing guarding the edge of the spectator’s gallery. Then he took a deep breath, and gazed down at the sea of commotion that boiled and eddied at his feet. It was one mad tumult of contending forces, a maelstrom of opposing currents. Seldom was there a lull in that hundred-throated delirium, where, on raised steps about a little circular brass railing, men shouted and danced and flung up their hands and raced back and forth through a swarming beehive of cotton-hunger. Some were hatless, some had thrown coats and vests open, some white as paper, and some red and perspiring; some were snowing handfuls of torn-up pad sheets over their comrades, some were penciling madly in call-books, some were feverishly handing slips to agile youths dodging in and out through the seething mass. Every now and then a loud-noted signal-bell sounded from one end of the hall, calling a messenger boy for despatches. In the momentary little lulls of that human tempest Durkin could catch the familiar pithy staccato of telegraph keys cluttering and pulsating with their hurried orders and news. He could see the operators, where they sat, apathetically pounding the brass, as unmoved as the youth at the light-crowned, red-lined blackboard, who caught up the different slips handed to him and methodically chalked down the calls under the various months.