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He went to school and college, and finally took orders, and was given a living in a county near where his people lived. Life went along easily enough for him, and perhaps a bit stupidly. Too stupidly. He got bored by it. So after a while he gambled. He played the stock-market. Presently he used some money that was not his that had been intrusted to him by another. He lost that.
As we sat at breakfast in a Fifth Avenue hotel I ran my eye eagerly over the stock-market reports and the financial news, and rallied Maude for a lack of spirits. "Aren't you glad to be home?" I asked her, as we sat in a hansom. "Of course I am, Hugh!" she protested. "But I can't look upon New York as home, somehow. It frightens me." I laughed indulgently. "You'll get used to it," I said.
Whether it ever existed I know not; but I certainly saw no trace of it, either in New York or Chicago. I dare say I ought to have gone to Seattle for it. My first sight of a stock-market roped off in the street was an acute disillusionment. In agitation it could not have competed with a sheep-market.
I had come on to New York on some important business; it was rather a long story a question of getting ahead of another party, in a certain particular way, in the stock-market. This other party had once played me a very mean trick. I owed him a grudge, I felt awfully savage at the time, and I vowed that, when I got a chance, I would, figuratively speaking, put his nose out of joint.
But, in my own private mind, I had resolved, that, as soon as our capital had grown large enough, and our credit was become sufficiently extensive, we would change our business to that of buying and selling cotton, as a better speculative; or, perhaps, would enter upon that grand arena of sudden fortune and sudden ruin, the stock-market. For the present, however, flour suited us well enough.
There were some meagre New York stock-market quotations in the papers; a paragraph in fine print announced the lynching of a negro in Alabama; another recorded a coal-mining strike in Pennsylvania. "I always have to get used to it over again," said Kenby.
How this most important feature of the occurrence came to be omitted in all the accounts of it can only be explained by those who thoroughly understand the exigencies of the stock-market, and the probable effect of certain classes of news upon approaching political situations, and who have made themselves familiar with the methods by which the pervasive power of the press is sometimes curtailed.
The capital which has been hitherto absorbed in stock-market loans for speculative purposes is now returning to the normal channels of business. There has been no inflation in the prices of commodities; there has been no undue accumulation of goods, and foreign trade has expanded to a magnitude which exerts a steadying influence upon activity in industry and employment.
Iron, more sensitive than the stock-market, was the barometer, and its readings in the Southern field were growing portentous. Within the month several of the smaller furnaces had gone out of blast, and Chiawassee Consolidated, though still presenting a fair exterior, was, Caleb feared, rotten at heart. What would Tom advise?
"Less than a week after the railroads are put entirely at our service, with three preceding days of scattered movements," answered Westerling. "Deliberate mobilizations are all right for a diplomatic threat that creates a furore in the newspapers and a depression in the stock-market, but which is not to be carried out. When you mean war, all speed and the war fever at white heat."
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