At this juncture any accident to our venture might affect the whole American business fabric, and no one realized the danger of the situation better than Mr. Rogers and myself. During the anxious days that were passing we canvassed the dire possibilities that the situation contained, just as children tell each other ghost stories when left alone in the darkness of the night. The great catastrophes of finance, we remembered, had all been born of the unexpected—of unforeseen contingencies—far beyond the range of human foresight. Who knew but that the hours were pregnant with some terrible potentiality—the assassination of a king or president, a Chicago or Boston fire, an epidemic of cholera, a belligerent message from the President, such as Cleveland's Venezuela ultimatum, a great bank defalcation, the suicide of an important operator, the death of an eminent capitalist—a breath of one of these world cyclones would crumble our structure into the dust and take along with it the neighboring edifices on both sides of the street. There were also the hidden possibilities of betrayal, of treachery, for we knew that scores of Wall Street's most ingenious minds were bent on unravelling and exposing the secret threads of our enterprise.
On Wednesday morning soon after ten o'clock Mr. Rogers, on his way downtown, came to the Waldorf. He was plainly excited.
"Lawson," he said, "this is something unheard of, unprecedented. The bank is being buried under subscriptions. Stillman says he is adding scores of clerks, but that he cannot possibly keep pace with the subscriptions. Mr. Rockefeller is very nervous, and I must confess to feeling a bit of 'rattle' myself. It now looks as though the total would run into fabulous figures. The Lewisohns are being swamped with orders from Europe. They alone will probably put in more than ten millions. Wall Street has lost its head entirely, and our people at 26 Broadway are coming in asking advice and doubling and trebling their subscriptions. If we don't keep our heads something bad may happen, for it looks now as though the cash the subscription is tying up would make a money-pinch.