By this time the circle of chairs facing the huge blackboard in the spacious outer office had begun to fill up.  Some of the customers, before taking their seats, hurried anxiously to the ticker, chattering away in its glass case; others turned abruptly and left the room without a word.  Now and then a customer would dive into Breen’s private room, remain a moment and burst out again, his face an index of the condition of his bank account.

When the chatter of the ticker had shifted from the London quotations to the opening sales on the Exchange, a sallow-faced clerk mounted a low step-ladder and swept a scurry of chalk marks over the huge blackboard, its margin lettered with the initials of the principal stocks.  The appearance of this nimble-fingered young man with his piece of chalk always impressed Jack as a sort of vaudeville performance.  On ordinary days, with the market lifeless, but half of the orchestra seats would be occupied.  In whirl-times, with the ticker spelling ruin, not only were the chairs full, but standing room only was available in the offices.

Their occupants came from all classes; clerks from up-town dry-goods houses, who had run down during lunch time to see whether U.P. or Erie, or St. Paul had moved up an eighth, or down a quarter, since they had devoured the morning papers on their way to town; old speculators who had spent their lives waiting buzzard-like for some calamity, enabling them to swoop down and make off with what fragments they could pick up; well-dressed, well-fed club men, who had had a run of luck and who never carried less than a thousand shares to keep their hands in; gray-haired novices nervously rolling little wads of paper between their fingers and thumbs—­up every few minutes to listen to the talk of the ticker, too anxious to wait until the sallow-faced young man with the piece of chalk could make his record on the board.  Some of them had gathered together their last dollar.  Two per cent. or one percent, or even one-half of one per cent. rise or fall was all that stood between them and ruin.

“Very sorry, sir, but you know we told you when you opened the account that you must keep your margins up,” Breen had said to an old man.  The old man knew; had known it all night as he lay awake, afraid to tell his wife of the sword hanging above their heads.  Knew it, too, when without her knowledge he had taken the last dollar of the little nest-egg to make good the deficit owed Breen & Co. over and above his margins, together with some other things “not negotiable”—­not our kind of collateral but “stuff” that could “lie in the safe until he could make some other arrangement,” the cashier had said with the firm’s consent.