Our client did not act as an officer of these himself, but merely took a power of attorney from the president, secretary, and treasurer, authorizing him to sign their names to these bond issues. Yet no one ever saw these officers, all of whom had names connotative of wealth and financial responsibility. The Gates, Morgan, Rogers, and other families multiplied and brought forth at the mere wave of his pen. If you wished a half-million bond issue you simply called him up on the telephone and some "Light and Power Company" would hold a directors' meeting and vote a fifty-year debenture gold seven-per-cent security that you could peddle around at fifty- eight and one-eighth to unsuspecting investors, so as to net them merely thirteen per cent. on their money--when they got it. You could buy a million in these bonds for about three hundred and seventy-five dollars and fifty cents; but they were real bonds in real companies and legally issued against some form of property, even if it had no market value. Sometimes, I am told, these securities paid interest for a year or so, and the suckers got their friends in while there were a few left--bonds, I mean--there are always suckers. Like other egoists, our client became careless as time went on and one day took it upon himself to issue a few hundred bonds in a company without holding a directors' meeting. He should not be severely blamed for neglecting a detail of this sort when he was so well aware of its purely formal if not farcical character. Still, it was one of those little slips that even the most careful of us will sometimes make, and the district-attorney took an underhand advantage of our friend and indicted him for forging the names of the officers of the company to an unauthorized issue of bonds. Gottlieb and I had, perforce, to defend him; but, unfortunately, his real defence would have been even worse than the charge. He could not say that there was no real company and that there were no such human beings as the persons whose names he had written across the back of the bonds in question. Poor fellow! He was an absolutely innocent man. Yet he went to Sing Sing for seven years for committing no crime at all. How could he forge the names of persons who did not exist? However, he had invented these financial Frankensteins and they finally overwhelmed him. Somewhere lying around I have my share of the fee in this case--I forget just where. It consists of fourteen millions in the securities of the National Mortgage and Security Company of Jampole, Mississippi. CHAPTER VII