hours or minutes. Fortunes were made and lost daily. Many people, confused by the conflict of opinions and announcements, sold their holdings, only to repurchase at higher prices as prices continued to mount. So fiercely was I attacked that it almost seemed at times as if my enemies might prevail in spite of the great powers at my back. Indeed, there were tense moments when my fate as well as my plans trembled in the balance. Several times I was sent for by Rogers and his colleagues for a war council, and sometimes, as I detailed my lines of defence and enumerated my resources, I suspected that even these storm-seasoned warriors were tiring of the fray.
The fiercest fighting at that early period centred round Butte & Boston and Boston & Montana. Many a spirited engagement we fought on the floor of the Exchange. Perhaps the fiercest of these began when, after a strenuous rush one morning, I rapidly carried the price of Butte up. This exploit so enraged my adversaries that they got together and organized a powerful combination against me. This included several of the leading banks and trust companies of Boston that held large amounts of stocks as collateral for my loans. At a given moment it was arranged that all these loans, aggregating millions of dollars, should be called; and further to intensify the complication they expected to bring about, a great friend in common attempted to scare Mr. Rockefeller and Mr. Rogers by informing them that the titles to the copper properties were defective, and that a man, then unknown, named Heinze, who had made himself very strong with the Montana courts, was about to make a move to confiscate them. There was a hurry call for me from New York, and this time the explanations had to be very full, for "Standard Oil" had an impression that while my general plan might be meritorious, it was possible that I had the details "skewed." However, I satisfied them as to the facts and then hurried back to tackle my own problem, for these individual engagements I handled myself, using my own personal resources to take care of them. The emergency that had developed thus suddenly was so serious as to be alarming, and it devolved on me to act,