and their success depended on their ability to guess whether or not a broker representing a big manipulator, like Tighe, had an order large enough to affect the market sufficiently to give them an opportunity to “get in and out,” as they termed it, at a profit before he had completed the execution of his order.  They were like hawks watching for an opportunity to snatch their prey from under the very claws of their opponents.

Four, five, ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, and sometimes the whole company would attempt to take advantage of the given rise of a given stock by either selling or offering to buy, in which case the activity and the noise would become deafening.  Given groups might be trading in different things; but the large majority of them would abandon what they were doing in order to take advantage of a speciality.  The eagerness of certain young brokers or clerks to discover all that was going on, and to take advantage of any given rise or fall, made for quick physical action, darting to and fro, the excited elevation of explanatory fingers.  Distorted faces were shoved over shoulders or under arms.  The most ridiculous grimaces were purposely or unconsciously indulged in.  At times there were situations in which some individual was fairly smothered with arms, faces, shoulders, crowded toward him when he manifested any intention of either buying or selling at a profitable rate.  At first it seemed quite a wonderful thing to young Cowperwood—­the very physical face of it—­for he liked human presence and activity; but a little later the sense of the thing as a picture or a dramatic situation, of which he was a part faded, and he came down to a clearer sense of the intricacies of the problem before him.  Buying and selling stocks, as he soon learned, was an art, a subtlety, almost a psychic emotion.  Suspicion, intuition, feeling—­these were the things to be “long” on.

Yet in time he also asked himself, who was it who made the real money—­the stock-brokers?  Not at all.  Some of them were making money, but they were, as he quickly saw, like a lot of gulls or stormy petrels, hanging on the lee of the wind, hungry and anxious to snap up any unwary fish.  Back of them were other men, men with shrewd ideas, subtle resources.  Men of immense means whose enterprise and holdings these stocks represented, the men who schemed out and built the railroads, opened the mines, organized trading enterprises, and built up immense manufactories.  They might use brokers or other agents to buy and sell on ’change; but this buying and selling must be, and always was, incidental to the actual fact—­the mine, the railroad, the wheat crop, the flour mill, and so on.  Anything less than straight-out sales to realize quickly on assets, or buying to hold as an investment, was gambling pure and simple, and these men were gamblers.  He was nothing more than a gambler’s agent.  It was not troubling him any just at this moment, but