“Yes, he can. I firmly believe that nothing short of a miracle can now upset his plan. Today he is not only the leader of the cotton pit; he is both openly and tacitly the supreme dictator of the market—of the world’s market. Why, last week, when he publicly announced that he was going down to Lakewood for a couple of days, the market fell back to 12.85 for an hour or two, and he had to jump in and start buying, just to give a little order to things. Somebody even said that when his wife and an actress friend of hers visited the Exchange gallery he asked them if they’d like to see a little panic on the floor. The actress said she’d love to see cotton go up a few points if he wouldn’t mind. Curry said all right, to watch out for some real acting. So he started down into the pit and pulled the strings until his puppets danced to their hearts’ content.” Frances nodded her appreciation of the scene’s dramatic values, and waited for Durkin to continue. “And one minor result of that was that one hour later a well-known cotton merchant was found in his chair, with a slowly widening stain of red on his shirt front, as the evening papers put it. He had shot himself through the heart—utterly ruined by that last little capricious rise in our Cotton King’s market.” “Who, after all, is not much better than a wire-tapper!” exclaimed the woman, with her mirthless little laugh of scorn. “There’s a difference—he thinks in big figures and affairs; we, up till now, have worked and worried and fretted over little things. This man Curry, too, is a sort of Napoleon. ‘You have to smash the eggs to make your omelet,’ was all he said when he heard that a big brokerage firm had closed its one hundred and twenty-five offices because of his bull operations. Why, this week he’s making his clerks eat and sleep right in the offices—he’s turned one of the rooms into a sort of dormitory, and has their meals sent up to them. And outside of all this he’s manipulating his own underground movement, doing that over his home wire, after his regular office hours.” “And this is the wire you have tapped?” “Yes, that’s the wire that has been giving me my information—or, rather, little scattered shreds of it. But here, mind, is where the difficulty comes in. Curry has got to let his partner, Green, down in New Orleans, in on the last movement of his campaign, so that the two can strike together. But he is wise, and he isn’t trusting that tip to any open wire. When the time comes it’s to be a cipher message. It will read, ‘Helen sails’—then such and such a time on such and such a day. That message Curry’s confidential operator will send out over the wire, under the protection of a quadruplex, from his Wall Street office. And that is the message I have to intercept.” She was moving her head slowly up and down, gazing at him with unseeing eyes. “And you have some plan for doing it?”