Page:The Wizard of Wall Street and his Wealth.djvu/149

 Says I, 'Speyers' (a broker employed by him that day) 'has already lost his reason; reason has gone out of everybody but me.' I continued, 'Now what are you going to do? You have got us into this thing, and what are you going to do to get out of it?' He says, 'I don't know. I will go and get my wife.' I said, 'Get her down here.' The soft talk was all over. He went up stairs and they returned, tottling into the room, looking older than Stephen Hopkins. His wife and he both looked like death. He was tottling just like that. (Illustrated by a trembling movement of the body.) 'I have never seen him from that day to this.'

"This is sworn evidence before a committee of Congress, and its humor is perhaps the more conspicuous because there is every reason to believe that there is not a word of truth in the story from beginning to end. No such interview ever occurred, except in the unconfined apartments of Mr. Fisk's imagination. His own previous statements make it certain that he was not at Corbin's house at all that day, and that Corbin did come to the Erie offices that evening and again the next morning. Corbin himself denies the truth of the account without limitation; and adds that when he entered the Erie offices the next morning, Fisk was there. 'I asked him how Mr. Gould felt after the great calamity of the day before.' He remarked, 'Oh, he has no courage at all. He has sunk right down. There is nothing left of him but a heap of clothes and a pair of eyes.' The internal evidence of truth in this