He did. It seems Teller was already doing a big business and would take all he could get. This was on Friday. The market had been going up all that week--this was twenty years ago, remember--and it was a cinch the bank statement on Saturday would show a big decrease in the surplus reserve. That would give the conventional excuse to the big room traders to jump on the market and try to shake out some of the weak commission-house accounts. There would be the usual reactions in the last half hour of the trading, particularly in stocks in which the public had been the most active. Those, of course, also would be the very stocks that Teller’s customers would be most heavily long of, and the shop might be glad to see some short selling in them. There is nothing so nice as catching the suckers both ways; and nothing so easy--with one-point margins. That Saturday morning I chased over to Hoboken to the Teller place. They had fitted up a big customers’ room with a dandy quotation board and a full force of clerks and a special policeman in gray. There were about twenty-five customers. I got talking to the manager. He asked me what he could do for me and I told him nothing; that a fellow could make much more money at the track on account of the odds and the freedom to bet your whole roll and stand to win thousands in minutes instead of piking for chicken feed in stocks and having to wait days, perhaps. He began to tell me how much safer the stock-market game was, and how much some of their customers made--you’d have sworn it was a regular broker who actually bought and sold your stocks on the Exchange--and how if a man only traded heavy he could make enough to satisfy anybody. He must have thought I was headed for some pool room and he wanted a whack at my roll before the ponies nibbled it away, for he said I ought to hurry up as the market closed at twelve o’clock on Saturdays. That would leave me free to devote the entire afternoon to other pursuits. I might have a bigger roll to carry to the track with me--if I picked the right stocks. I looked as if I didn’t believe him, and he kept on buzzing me. I was watching the clock. At 11:15 I said, “All right,” and I began to give him selling orders in various stocks. I put up two thousand dollars in cash, and he was very glad to get it. He told me he thought I’d make a lot of money and hoped I’d come in often. It happened just as I figured. _The traders hammered the stocks in which they figured they would uncover the most stops, and, sure enough, prices slid off. I closed out my trades just before the rally of the last five minutes on the usual traders’ covering._ There was fifty-one hundred dollars coming to me. I went to cash in. “I’m glad I dropped in,” I said to the manager, and gave him my tickets. “Say,” he says to me, “I can’t give you all of it. I wasn’t looking for such a run. I’ll have it here for you Monday morning, sure as blazes.”