WALL STREET STORIES BY EDWIN LEFÈVRE NEW YORK McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO. 1901 COPYRIGHT, 1901, BY S. S. MCCLURE CO. 1900 AND 1901, BY FRANK A. MUNSEY 1901, BY MCCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO. FIRST IMPRESSION OCTOBER, 1901 SECOND IMPRESSION NOVEMBER, 1901 THIRD IMPRESSION NOVEMBER, 1901 TO Samuel Hughes Watts ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CONTENTS PAGE THE WOMAN AND HER BONDS 1 THE BREAK IN TURPENTINE 31 THE TIPSTER 77 A PHILANTHROPIC WHISPER 113 THE MAN WHO WON 129 THE LOST OPPORTUNITY 161 PIKE’S PEAK OR BUST 175 A THEOLOGICAL TIPSTER 209 THE WOMAN AND HER BONDS It seemed to Fullerton F. Colwell, of the famous Stock-Exchange house of Wilson & Graves, that he had done his full duty by his friend Harry Hunt. He was a director in a half score of companies—financial _débutantes_ which his firm had “brought out” and over whose stock-market destinies he presided. His partners left a great deal to him, and even the clerks in the office ungrudgingly acknowledged that Mr. Colwell was “the hardest worked man in the place, barring none”—an admission that means much to those who know it is always the downtrodden clerks who do all the work and their employers who take all the profit and credit. Possibly the important young men who did all the work in Wilson & Graves’ office bore witness to Mr. Colwell’s industry so cheerfully, because Mr. Colwell was ever inquiring, very courteously, and, above all, sympathetically, into the amount of work each man had to perform, and suggesting, the next moment, that the laborious amount in question was indisputably excessive. Also, it was he who raised salaries; wherefore he was the most charming as well as the busiest man there. Of his partners, John G. Wilson was a consumptive, forever going from one health resort to another, devoting his millions to the purchase of railroad tickets in the hope of out-racing Death. George B. Graves was a dyspeptic, nervous, irritable, and, to boot, penurious; a man whose chief recommendation at the time Wilson formed the firm had been his cheerful willingness to do all the dirty work. Frederick R. Denton was busy in the “Board Room”—the Stock Exchange—all day, executing orders, keeping watch over the market behavior of the stocks with which