Cotton fell to seven and a half cents and the muttered protest became angry denunciation. Why was it? Who was doing it?
Harry Cresswell went to Montgomery. He was getting nervous. The thing was too vast. He could not grasp it. It set his head in a whirl.
Harry Cresswell was not a bad man‚ÅÝ‚Äîare there any bad men? He was a man who from the day he first wheedled his black mammy into submission, down to his thirty-sixth year, had seldom known what it was voluntarily to deny himself or curb a desire.
To rise when he would, eat what he craved, and do what the passing fancy suggested had long been his day’s programme. Such emptiness of life and aim had to be filled, and it was filled; he helped his father sometimes with the plantations, but he helped spasmodically and played at work.
The unregulated fire of energy and delicacy of nervous poise within him continually hounded him to the verge of excess and sometimes beyond.
Cool, quiet, and gentlemanly as he was by rule of his clan, the ice was thin and underneath raged unappeased fires.
He craved the madness of alcohol in his veins till his delicate hands trembled of mornings.
The women whom he bent above in languid, veiled-eyed homage, feared lest they love him, and what work was to others gambling was to him.
The Cotton Combine, then, appealed to him overpoweringly‚ÅÝ‚Äîto his passion for wealth, to his passion for gambling. But once entered upon the game it drove him to fear and frenzy: first, it was a long game and Harry Cresswell was not trained to waiting, and, secondly, it was a game whose intricacies he did not know. In vain did he try to study the matter through. He ordered books from the North, he subscribed for