Adequate manipulative machinery, moreover, can be perfected only with much toil and patience and money. Professional Wall Street will always tell you that “the tape tells the story.” The little paper ribbon, therefore, must be made to tell such stories as the manipulator desires should be told to the public; he must produce certain effects which should preserve an appearance of alluring spontaneity and, above all, of legitimacy and candor; he must be a great artist in mendacity and at the same time have the superb self-confidence of a grizzly. Several members of the syndicate had many of these qualities, but none had them all. It was decided to put “Turp” stock in the hands of Samuel Wimbleton Sharpe, the best manipulator Wall Street had ever known. “Jakey” Greenbaum said he would conduct the negotiations with the great plunger. Sharpe was a financial free-lance, free-booter and free-thinker. He had made his first fortune in the mining camps of Arizona and finding that field too narrow had come to New York, where he could gamble to his heart’s content. He was all the things that an ideal manipulator should be and several more. He had arrived in New York with a sneer on his lips and a loaded revolver in his financial hands. The other “big operators” looked at him in pained astonishment. “I carry my weapons openly,” Sharpe told them, “and you conceal your dirks. Don’t hurt yourselves trying to look honest. I never turn my back on such as you.” Of this encounter was born a hostility that never grew faint. Sharpe had nothing of his own to unload on anyone else, no property to overcapitalize and sell to an undiscriminating public by means of artistic lies and his enemies often did. So they called him a gambler, very bitterly, and he called them philanthropists, very cheerfully. If he thought a stock was unduly high he sold it confidently, aggressively, stupendously. If he thought a stock was too low he bought it boldly, ready to take all the offerings and bid for more. And once on the march, he might be temporarily checked, be forced by the enemy to halt for a day or a week or a month; but inevitably he arrived. And such an arrival!