III. From the start the new firm did well. Colonel Thornton and two or three friends who followed him from Tracy & Middleton’s office, all of them “plungers,” were almost enough to keep Hayward busy on the Exchange executing orders, and, moreover, new customers were coming in. Had he been satisfied with this start, and with letting time do the rest, he would have fared very well. But he began to speculate for himself, and all reputable commission men will tell you, with varying degrees of emphasis, that this not only “ties up” the firm’s money, but that no man can “trade”—speculate—on his own hook and at the same time do justice to his customers. Thornton was a rich man, and protected his own speculations more than amply. He noticed the development of his young partner’s gambling proclivities, and remonstrated with him—in a kindly, paternal sort of way. Sally vowed he would stop. Within less than three months he had broken his promise twice, and his unsuccessful operations in Alabama Coal at one time threatened seriously to embarrass the firm. Colonel Thornton came to the rescue. Sally promised, with a solemnity born of sincere fear, never to do it again. But fright lasts but a little space, and memory is equally short-lived. Wall Street has no room for men with an excess of timidity or of recollection. He had gambled before he joined the New York Stock Exchange. After all, if speculating were a crime and convictions could be secured in fifty out of a hundred flagrant instances, one half the male population of the United States would perforce consist of penitentiary guards forever engaged in watching over the convicted other half, Sally told a customer one day. And then, too, Willis N. Hayward, the Board member of Thornton & Hayward, was a very different person from Sally, the nice little telephone-boy of Tracy & Middleton’s. His cheeks were not pink; they were mottled. His eyes were not clear and ingenuous; they were shifty and a bit watery. He had been in Wall Street eight or ten years, and he overworked his nerves every day from 10 A.M. to 3 P.M. on the Stock Exchange; also from 5 P.M. to midnight at the café of a big up-town hotel, where Wall Street men gathered to talk shop. His system craved stimulants; gambling and liquor were the strongest he knew. When, after three years, the firm expired by limitation, Colonel Thornton withdrew. He had had enough of Hayward’s plunging. To be sure, Sally had become a shrewd “trader,” and he had made $75,000 during the big bull boom; but he was at heart a “trader,” which is to say, a mere gambler in stocks, and not a desirable commission man.