The leader was unloading. It was rumored that five thousand bales more than the whole crop had been sold. The bubble had been overblown. There was still time to be on the safe side. And like people fighting in a fire-panic, they tore and trampled one another down, and blocked the way to their own deliverance, through the very frenzy of their passion to escape. But the downward trend had already begun. Everybody attempted to unload. Outside orders to follow the movement promptly poured in. What before had been unrest was soon panic, and then pandemonium. Men and youths bending over office tickers, women at quiet home telephones, plungers and “occasionals” watching bulletin-boards, miles and miles away—all took up the startled cry. Wire-houses promptly heard of the unloading movement, of the abdication of the bull king, and a mad stream of selling orders added to the rout of the day. Curry had started the current; he let it take its course. Through its own great volume, he knew, it could easily carry all opposition down with it. He even ostentatiously drew on his tan-colored gloves, and took up his overcoat, as he announced, laughingly, that he was out of the market, and that he was off to Florida for a holiday. Then a second panic—frenzied, irrational, desperate, self-destroying panic—took hold of that leaderless mob, trampling out their last hope with their own feverish feet. Curry had liquidated his entire holdings! He was going South for the winter! He was carrying out his old threat to take the bears by the neck! He had caught the pool on the eve of betraying him! They had warned him that he would find no mercy if he did not draw in with his manipulations. He had found treachery used against him, and as he had promised, he was giving them a dose of their own medicine. July, in the mad rush, dropped fifty points, then a ruinous one hundred more, then wilted and withered down another fifty, until it stood 173 points below its highest quotation mark. The rout was absolute and complete. Seeing, of a sudden, that the market might even go utterly to pieces, without hope of redemption, the old-time bull leader, now with a pallor on his plump face, leaped into the Pit, and tried to hold the runaway forces within bounds. But his voice was lost in the din and tumult. He was a mere cork on the grim tide of disaster. Even his own frantic efforts were in vain. The _coup_ had been effected. The day had been won and lost! Durkin did not wait for the gong to sound. He hurried round to Robinson & Little’s offices, racing past disheveled men as excited as himself. Neither member of the distraught firm of Robinson & Little was to be seen. But a senior clerk, with a pale face and a wilted collar, quickly and nonchalantly counted Durkin out his money, after verifying the slip, and speaking a brief word or two with his master over the telephone.