When the excitement seemed at its highest, when the shrill-noted chorus of sellers and buyers was shrieking its loudest, Samuel Curry went out to eat his luncheon. This was at once noticed and commented on,—for dozens of eyes, both eager and haggard, watched the leader’s every move and expression. The change that swept over the Pit was magical. The tumult subsided. The shouting men about the brass railing stopped to take breath. The sallow-faced young man who chalked prices up on the Pit-edge blackboard rested his tired fingers. Brokers sat about on little camp-stools. For the first time Durkin could catch the sound of the sustained note of the telegraph keys clicking busily away. The sunlight fell across the paper-littered floor. The crowd in the gallery grew less. The operators were joking and chatting. A messenger boy had fallen asleep on his bench. The army was waiting for the return of its leader. Curry re-entered the Pit quietly, with a toothpick in one corner of his mouth. He stood there for a moment or two, his thumbs in his waistcoat armholes, rocking comfortably back and forth on his heels, enigmatically and indolently watching the floor which his reappearance had first reanimated and then thrown into sudden confusion. Durkin, in turn, watched the leader closely, breathlessly, waiting for the beginning of the end. He saw Curry suddenly throw away his toothpick and signal to a bent and pale-haired floor broker, who shot over to his leader’s side, exchanged a whispered word or two with him, and then shot back to the brass railing. There he flung his hands up in the air, with fingers outthrust, and yelled like a madman: “Buy July fifty-one! Buy July fifty-two! Buy July fifty-three—four—five! Buy July fifty-six!” That single-throated challenge was like a match to waiting ordnance. With arms still extended and gaunt fingers outstretched he kept it up, for one moment. Then the explosion came. Already, it seemed he had imparted his madness to the men who screamed and fought and gesticulated about him. “Buy July sixty-three! Buy July sixty-four! Buy July sixty-five—sixty-seven—sixty-eight!” The frenzy in the Pit increased. Up, up went July cotton to seventy, to seventy-one, even to seventy-two. In thirty years and over no such price had ever been known. Eighty-five million dollars’ worth of cotton bales, on paper, were deliriously exchanging hands. But, all things must reach their end. The bow had been bent to the uttermost. The tide had flooded into its highest point. A sudden change came over Curry. He flung up his two hands, and brought them smartly together over his jauntily tilted black derby. This done, he elbowed and pushed his way hurriedly to the ring-side. The market hung on his next breath. “Sell twenty thousand May at sixty!” A silence; like that which intervenes between the lightning flash and the thunder-clap, fell in the Pit.