The faces of the men to whom these cracked and hoarsened voices belonged had become bestial and wolfish.  Where the morning had seen well-groomed representatives of Money’s upper caste, the afternoon saw a seething mass of human ragamuffins, torn of clothing, sweat-drenched and lost to all senses save those twin emotions of ferocity and fear.  Back and forth they swirled and eddied, and howled like wild things about carrion.  At one side, panting, disheveled and bleeding from scratches incurred in the melee, bulked the gigantic figure of Len Haswell.  He had no need now to bellow in a bull-like duel of voices and ferocity.  The stampede had been so well put into motion that the floor was doing for him his deadly work of price-smashing.  Telegraph wires were quivering from every section of the United States to the tune of—­“Sell—­cut loose—­throw over!” A universal mania to get any price for anything was sweeping the land like a conflagration.  Tomorrow would bring those reflexes from today when banks and trust companies from the Lakes to the Rio Grande would topple in the wake of their metropolitan predecessors.  Ruin sat crowned and enthroned, monarch of the day and parent of a panic which should close mills, and starve the poor and foster anarchy—­but Hamilton Burton’s hand was nearer Edwardes’ throat.

Staples and his twenty cooeperators fought on doggedly, grimly, to turn the tide before the close, but the nation was mad, and the men who fought and clamored here in this pit of its bowels were the most violent maniacs.

And while these things went forward Mary Burton still sat alone in the private office of Jefferson Edwardes, waiting.  Through century-long hours she had in her ears only the din from the street and that incessant ticking of the stock-tape at her elbow.

Every few minutes she rose and anxiously ran through her fingers the long thin coil of paper which it fed so endlessly into its tall wicker basket.  She could make little of those abbreviated letters and numbers, though she realized that every succeeding glance showed a shrinkage of each value.  One thing she could read with a deadly clarity—­those hideous words that meant the falling of the outposts.  “So and So announce that they cannot meet their obligations.”  There were other grim scraps of information, too, wedged between the hurried quotations such as, “Police reserves called to quell riot at closed North Bank,” and finally, “Troops from Governor’s Island to guard sub-treasury.”

Finally she went to the window and raised the sash to let the cold air blow against her fevered cheeks, and as she did so she heard yells and the gongs of patrol-wagons.  The madness was spreading beyond the confines of enclosing walls.

Mary Burton turned, heavy-hearted, back to the room’s interior and her glance fell on the clock.  It recorded two-forty.  She wondered when Edwardes would return.  She had spent the day in his office because she knew that when he came in, as he had done several times, only to hasten out again, he found in her forced smile renewal of strength for his combat, which enabled him to go out smiling through the drawn agony of his harassment.