At this the distinguished impassivity faded finally away and Samuel Untermyer was actually and absolutely flabbergasted. The sight of him dumfounded, confused, was too much for me. I laughed. It is seldom one gets the laugh on Mr. Untermyer.
"Do you mean to tell me you were short the whole bunch?"
"Short every share of it, and 10,000 besides," said I.
"And where do you stand now?" he pursued.
"Still short of it, and before you can get fairly to work kicking up a rumpus I should not be surprised if we were short the whole capital stock. Rogers, as you know, does play a great game, that is, when he has all the cards, owns the table, the room it's in, and has control of the doorkeeper."
There was an interval of tense silence. Untermyer was making a noble effort to swallow his fury. I began to figure the degree of my responsibility if he should burst a blood-vessel or have an apoplectic stroke. Finally he said:
"Lawson, if I don't blow this thing to pieces and shake 26 Broadway to its foundations, I'm not Sam Untermyer."
The time had come to reason with the heated legal gentleman, and in plain language I proceeded to show him where he stood, the position of the property, the public's relation to it, and his own duty to the clients whose money he had invested in it. Under the logic of my argument he cooled. He saw the net, and that he and his friends were absolutely enmeshed. He even admitted that he and his friends had unknowingly aided in what had occurred and were mostly to blame for their present position; but while he acknowledged all this, he reiterated over and over again that in all his experience—and in Samuel Untermyer's professional