Capitalists and financiers -- Fiction; Psychological fiction
Monday, the ninth, dawned gray and cheerless. He was up with the first
ray of light, shaved and dressed, and went over, under the gray-green
pergola, to his father’s house. He was up, also, and stirring about,
for he had not been able to sleep. His gray eyebrows and gray hair
looked rather shaggy and disheveled, and his side-whiskers anything but
decorative. The old gentleman’s eyes were tired, and his face was gray.
Cowperwood could see that he was worrying. He looked up from a small,
ornate escritoire of buhl, which Ellsworth had found somewhere, and
where he was quietly tabulating a list of his resources and
liabilities. Cowperwood winced. He hated to see his father worried, but
he could not help it. He had hoped sincerely, when they built their
houses together, that the days of worry for his father had gone
forever.
“Counting up?” he asked, familiarly, with a smile. He wanted to hearten
the old gentleman as much as possible.
“I was just running over my affairs again to see where I stood in
case—” He looked quizzically at his son, and Frank smiled again.
“I wouldn’t worry, father. I told you how I fixed it so that Butler and
that crowd will support the market. I have Rivers and Targool and Harry
Eltinge on ’change helping me sell out, and they are the best men
there. They’ll handle the situation carefully. I couldn’t trust Ed or
Joe in this case, for the moment they began to sell everybody would
know what was going on with me. This way my men will seem like bears
hammering the market, but not hammering too hard. I ought to be able to
unload enough at ten points off to raise five hundred thousand. The
market may not go lower than that. You can’t tell. It isn’t going to
sink indefinitely. If I just knew what the big insurance companies were
going to do! The morning paper hasn’t come yet, has it?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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