A month later Mr. Teague became editor in chief of the _Nevada State Journal_ and severed his connection with the _Nevada Mining News_. I succeeded Mr. Teague as editor and my name appeared at the head of the editorial columns. At about the same time the Sullivan & Rice enterprise was abandoned. I discovered that most of the money Mr. Sullivan had put into the corporation had been borrowed by him from a member of my own family with whom he had hypothecated most of his stock in the company. A rumpus ensued which ended in the shutting up of the $1-3/4shop. By August Goldfield Consolidated had been manipulated back to $8.37-1/2 a share. Mr. Baruch's option could certainly prove of little value to him unless the stock sold higher at periods than $7.50. But he now evidently found it a hard job to hold the stock above $7.50. By September it had receded again to $7.40. At this period it was reported in Reno that George Wingfield, sick of his partner's bad bargain, was beginning to assert himself and demanded that the Baruch option be cancelled at whatever cost. The erratic price movement of the stock was causing the loss of public confidence. The manipulation appeared to be raw. Without any important transpiration except the news of the Baruch option and the varying statements put out by Senator Nixon from time to time regarding the plans of the company, which was now awaiting the erection of a huge mill before going on a regular producing basis, the stock had dropped from $10 to $4.50, recovered to $7 and eased off to $6-1/8, rallied to above $8, and was again tumbling. The option to Mr. Baruch was conceded to be practically a flat failure from a company standpoint, only 20,000 shares of stock having been purchased by Mr. Baruch from the treasury of the company in nine months. The impression prevailed that Mr. Baruch was milking the market and held the option principally as a club to accomplish his market designs. Moreover, nearly every broker, investor and speculator residing in Goldfield by this time had gone broke because of the vagaries of this stock in the market, and the losses in bad loans and unsecured overdrafts incurred by John S. Cook & Company's bank, controlled by Messrs. Nixon and Wingfield, was said to total nearly $2,000,000 as a result of the almost general smash in market values. The entire Goldfield list, with the exception of Goldfield Consolidated, was now selling at 25 cents on the dollar compared with boom prices of less than a year before, and it was a rather ordinary "piker" sort of broker or speculator in Goldfield who at this time could not boast of being in "soak" to John S. Cook & Company's bank anywhere from $15,000 to $100,000.