There I was, a mere kid, who had never before been away from home, flat broke; but I knew there wasn’t anything wrong with me; only with my play. I don’t know whether I make myself plain, but I never lose my temper over the stock market. I never argue with the tape. Getting sore at the market doesn’t get you anywhere. I was so anxious to resume trading that I didn’t lose a minute, but went to old man Fullerton and said to him, “Say, A. R., lend me five hundred dollars.” “What for?” says he. “I’ve got to have some money.” “What for?” he says again. “For margin, of course,” I said. “Five hundred dollars?” he said, and frowned. “You know they’d expect you to keep up a 10 per cent margin, and that means one thousand dollars on one hundred shares. Much better to give you a credit----” “No,” I said, “I don’t want a credit here. I already owe the firm something. What I want is for you to lend me five hundred dollars so I can go out and get a roll and come back.” “How are you going to do it?” asked old A. R. “I’ll go and trade in a bucket shop,” I told him. “Trade here,” he said. “No,” I said. “I’m not sure yet I can beat the game in this office, but I am sure I can take money out of the bucket shops. I know that game. I have a notion that I know just where I went wrong here.” He let me have it, and I went out of that office where the Boy Terror of the Bucket Shops, as they called him, had lost his pile. I couldn’t go back home because the shops there would not take my business. New York was out of the question; there weren’t any doing business at that time. They tell me that in the 90’s Broad Street and New Street were full of them. But there weren’t any when I needed them in my business. So after some thinking I decided to go to St. Louis. I had heard of two concerns there that did an enormous business all through the Middle West. Their profits must have been huge. They had branch offices in dozens of towns. In fact I had been told that there were no concerns in the East to compare with them for volume of business. They ran openly and the best people traded there without any qualms. A fellow even told me that the owner of one of the concerns was a vice-president of the Chamber of Commerce but that couldn’t have been in St. Louis. At any rate, that is where I went with my five hundred dollars to bring back a stake to use as margin in the office of A. R. Fullerton & Co., members of the New York Stock Exchange. When I got to St. Louis I went to the hotel, washed up and went out to find the bucket shops. One was the J. G. Dolan Company, and the other was H. S. Teller & Co. I knew I could beat them. I was going to play dead safe--carefully and conservatively. My one fear was that somebody might recognize me and give me away, because the bucket shops all over the country had heard of the Boy Trader. They are like gambling houses and get all the gossip of the profesh.