New York (N.Y.) -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Wall Street (New York, N.Y.) -- Fiction
If the colonel gave a hint to the customers there would be an avalanche
of selling orders that would make the price of the stock break sharply,
and this would not benefit anyone. He had advised them to buy the stock
at 90 and at 95–-it was 105 now. He had more than done his duty. If they
did not sell out, in the hope of making more, it was their own lookout.
But there was the boy with the one hundred shares, the pleasant little
clerk from up-the-State, who had brought in his entire fortune, his
accumulated savings of two hundred and ten dollars. He was a stranger to
Wall Street. But supposing he should tell that he had been advised to
sell? There would be the deuce to pay!
The colonel took chances. Out of one corner of his mouth, so that he did
not even turn his head toward the boy and so that the watching customers
could not suspect what he was doing, he shot a quick whisper—a lob-sided
but philanthropic affair—at him: “Look at the color of your money, boy!
Take your profits and say nothing!” And he walked into the room where
the Suburban Trolley magnates awaited him impatiently.
Carey, thrilled but taciturn, gave his order to sell his Easton &
Allentown, unsuspected by the mob. They sold it for him at 105⅛.
Deducting commissions and interest charges the colonel’s whisper had put
$1,050 in the young clerk’s pocket.
And the stock went a little higher and then declined slowly to about 99.
The customers all made a great deal of money as it was, but not as much
as they would have “taken out” of the Easton & Allentown “deal” if they
had overheard that one of Colonel Treadwell’s many whispers—lob-sided
but philanthropic affairs!
THE MAN WHO WON
“Brown,” said Mr. John P. Greener, as he turned away from the ticker in
the corner, “I wish you would go over to the Board and see how the
market is for Iowa Midland. Find out how much stock there is for sale
and who has it. It ought to be pretty well distributed about the
Street.”
“What’s up in it?” asked his partner, curiously.
“Nothing—yet,” answered Greener, quietly.
He sat down at his desk and took up a letter, headed “President’s
Office, Keokuk & Northern Railway Company, Keokuk, Iowa.” When he had
finished the entire sixteen closely written pages, he arose and paced
slowly up and down his office.
He was a sallow-faced, black-bearded little man, slender—almost frail
looking—with a high but rather narrow forehead. His eyes were furtive,
shifty bits of brown light. He was thinking, and thinking to some
purpose. Any one, even a stranger, seeing him, would have known that he
was thinking of something big—the forehead was responsible for the
impression; and also of something tricky, unscrupulous, cold-blooded—his
eyes were to blame there. At length his brow cleared. He muttered: “I
must have that road. Then, a consolidation with my Keokuk & Northern;
and a new system that will endure as long as the country!”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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