The next day Sugar opened with a wild rush:  “25,000 shares from 140 to 152.”  That is the way it came on the tape, which meant that the crowd around the Sugar-pole was a mob and that the transactions were so heavy, quick, and tangled that no one could tell to a certainty just what the first or opening price was; but after the first lull, after the gong, there were officially reported transactions aggregating 25,000 shares and at prices varying from 140 to 152.  I was over on the floor to see the scramble, for it was noised about long before ten o’clock that Sugar would open wild, and then, too, I wanted to be handy if Bob should need any quick advice.

A minute before the gong struck, there were three hundred men jammed around the Sugar-pole; men with set, determined faces; men with their coats buttoned tight and shoulders thrown back for the rush to which, by comparison, that of a football team is child’s play.  Every man in that crowd was a picked man, picked for what was coming.  Each felt that upon his individual powers to keep a clear head, to shout loudest, to forget nothing, to keep his feet, and to stay as near the centre of the crowd as possible, depended his “floor honour,” perhaps his fortune, or, what was more to him, his client’s fortune.  Nearly every man of them was a college graduate who had won his spurs at athletics or a seasoned floor man whose training had been even more severe than that of the college campus.  When it is known before the opening of the Exchange that there are to be “things doing” in a certain stock, it is the rule to send only the picked floor men into the crowd.  There may be a fortune to make or to lose in a minute or a sliver of a minute.  For instance, the man who that morning was able to snatch the first 5,000 shares sold at 140 could have resold them a few minutes afterward at 152 and secured $60,000 profit.  And the man who was sent into the crowd by his client to sell 5,000 shares at the “opening” and who got but 140, when the price would be 152 by the time he reported to his customer, was a man to be pitied.  Again, the trader who the night before had decided that Sugar had gone up too fast, and who had “shorted” (that is, sold what he did not have, with the intention of repurchasing at a lower price than he sold it for) 5,000 shares at 140 and who, finding himself in that surging mob with Sugar selling at 152, could only get out by taking a loss of $60,000, or by taking another chance of later paying 162—­such a trader was also to be pitied.

No one who scanned the crowd that morning would have believed that the calm, set face on that erect Indian figure, occupying the very centre of that horde of gamblers who were only awaiting the ringing clang of the gong to hurl themselves like madmen at each other, was the hysterical man who the night before was wildly praying for this moment.  Nearly every man in that crowd was calm, but Bob Brownley was the calmest of them all.  It’s the Exchange code that