Friday, the Thirteenth: A Novel
Shortly after the October 1st statements had been sent out, Bob dropped
in on Kate and me one night. After she had retired and we had lit our
cigars in the library he said:
“Jim, I want some of that old-fashioned advice of yours. Sugar is selling
at 110, and it is worth it; in fact it is cheap. The stock is well
distributed among investors, not much of it floating round ‘the Street.’ A
good, big buying movement, well handled, would jump it to 175 and keep it
there. Am I sound?”
I agreed with him.
“All right. Now what reason is there for a good, big, stiff uplift? That
tariff bill is up at Washington. If it goes through, Sugar will be cheaper
at 175 than at 110.”
Again I agreed.
“‘Standard Oil’ and the Sugar people know whether it is going through, for
they control the Senate and the House and can induce the President to be
good. What do you say to that?”
“O.K.,” I answered.
“No question about it, is there?”
“Not the slightest.”
“Right again. When 26 Broadway[1] gives the secret order to the
Washington boss and he passes it out to the grafters, there will be a
quiet accumulation of the stock, won’t there?”
“You’ve got that right, Bob.”
“And the man who first knows when Washington begins to take on Sugar is
the man who should load up quick and rush it up to a high level. If he
does it quickly, the stockholders, who now have it, will get a juicy slice
of the ripening melon, a slice that otherwise would go to those greedy
hypocrites at Washington, who are always publicly proclaiming that they
are there to serve their fellow countrymen, but who never tire of
expressing themselves to their brokers as not being in politics for their
health.”
“So far, good reasoning,” I commented.
“Jim, the man who first knows when the Senators and Congressmen and
members of the Cabinet begin to buy Sugar, is the man who can kill four
birds with one stone: Win back a part of Judge Sands’s stolen fortune;
increase his own pile against the first of January, when, if the little
Virginian lady is short a few hundred thousand of the necessary amount,
he could, if he found a way to induce her to accept it, supply the
deficiency; fatten up a good friend’s bank account a million or so, and do
a right good turn for the stockholders who are about to be, for the
hundredth time, bled out of profit rightfully theirs.”
Bob was afire with enthusiasm, the first I had seen him show for three
months. Seeing that I had followed him without objection so far, he
continued:
“Well, Jim, I know the Washington buying has begun. All I know I have dug
out for myself and am free to use it any way I choose. I have gone over
the deal with Beulah Sands, and we have decided to plunge. She has a
balance of about four hundred thousand dollars, and I’m going to spread it
thin. I am going to buy her 20,000 shares and to take on 10,000 for
myself. If you went in for 20,000 more, it would give me a wide sea to
sail in. I know you never speculate, Jim, for the house, but I thought you
might in this case go in personally.”
“Don’t say anything more, Bob,” I replied. “This time the rule goes by the
board. But I will do better: I’ll put up a million and you can go as high
as 70,000 for me. That will give you a buying power of 100,000, and I
want you to use my last 50,000 shares as a lifter.”
I had never speculated in a share of stock since I entered the firm of
Randolph & Randolph, and on general, special, and every other principle
was opposed to stock gambling, but I saw how Bob had worked it out, and
that to make the deal sure it was necessary for him to have a good reserve
buying power to fall back on if, after he got started, the “System”
masters, whose game he was butting in to and whose plans he might upset
should try to shake down the price to drive him out of their preserves.
Bob knew how I looked at his proposed deal and ordinarily would not have
allowed me to have the short end of it, but so changed had he become in
his anxiety to make that money for the Virginians that he grabbed at my
acceptance.
“Thank you, Jim,” he said fervently, and he continued: “Of course, I see
what’s going through your head, but I’ll accept the favour, for the deal
is bound to be successful. I know your reason for coming in is just to
help out, and that you won’t feel badly because your last 50,000 shares
will be used more as a guarantee for the deal’s success than for profit.
And Miss Sands could not object to the part you play, as she did at the
underwriting, for you will get a big profit anyway.”
Next day Sugar was lively on the Exchange. Bob bought all in sight and
handled the buying in a masterly way. When the closing gong struck, Beulah
Sands had 20,000 shares, which averaged her 115; Bob and I had 30,000 at
an average of 125, and the stock had closed 132 bid and in big demand.
Miss Sands’s 20,000 showed $340,000 profit, while our 30,000 showed
$210,000 at the closing price. All the houses with Washington wires were
wildly scrambling for Sugar as soon as it began to jump. And it certainly
looked as though the shares were good for the figures set for them by Bob,
$175, at which price the Sands’s profits would be $1,200,000. Bob was
beside himself with joy. He dined with Kate and me, and as I watched him
my heart almost stopped beating at the thought—“if anything should happen
to upset his plans!” His happiness was pathetic to witness. He was like a
child. He threw away all the reserve of the past three months and laughed
and was grave by turns. After dinner, as we sat in the library over our
coffee, he leaned over to my wife and said:
“Katherine Randolph, you and Jim don’t know what misery I have been in for
three months, and now—will to-morrow never come, so I may get into the
whirl and clean up this deal and send that girl back to her father with
the money! I wanted her to telegraph the judge that things looked like she
would win out and bring back the relief, but she would not hear of it. She
is a marvellous woman. She has not turned a hair to-day. I don’t think her
pulse is up an eighth to-night. She has not sent home a word of
encouragement since she has been here, more than to tell her father she is
doing well with her stories. It seems they both agreed that the only way
to work the thing out was ‘whole hog or none,’ and that she was to say
nothing until she could herself bring the word ‘saved’ or ‘lost.’ I don’t
know but she is right. She says if she should raise her father’s hopes,
and then be compelled to dash them, the effect would be fatal.”
Bob rushed the talk along, flitting from one point to another, but
invariably returning to Beulah Sands and to-morrow and its saving
profits. Finally, he got to a pitch where it seemed as though he must take
off the lid, and before Kate or I realised what was coming he placed
himself in front of us and said:
“Jim, Kate, I cannot go into to-morrow without telling you something that
neither of you suspect. I must tell some one, now that everything is
coming out right and that Beulah is to be saved; and whom can I tell but
you, who have been everything to me?—I love Beulah Sands, surely, deeply,
with every bit of me. I worship her, I tell you, and to-morrow, to-morrow
if this deal comes out as it must come, and I can put $1,500,000 into her
hands and send her home to her father, then, then, I will tell her I love
her, and Jim, Kate, if she’ll marry me, good-bye, good-bye to this hell of
dollar-hunting, good-bye to such misery as I have been in for three
months, and home, a Virginia home, for Beulah and me.” He sank into a
chair and tears rolled down his cheeks Poor, poor Bob, strong as a lion in
adversity, hysterical as a woman with victory in sight.
The next day Sugar opened with a wild rush: “25,000 shares from 140 to
152.” That is the way it came on the tape, which meant that the crowd
around the Sugar-pole was a mob and that the transactions were so heavy,
quick, and tangled that no one could tell to a certainty just what the
first or opening price was; but after the first lull, after the gong,
there were officially reported transactions aggregating 25,000 shares and
at prices varying from 140 to 152. I was over on the floor to see the
scramble, for it was noised about long before ten o’clock that Sugar would
open wild, and then, too, I wanted to be handy if Bob should need any
quick advice.
A minute before the gong struck, there were three hundred men jammed
around the Sugar-pole; men with set, determined faces; men with their
coats buttoned tight and shoulders thrown back for the rush to which, by
comparison, that of a football team is child’s play. Every man in that
crowd was a picked man, picked for what was coming. Each felt that upon
his individual powers to keep a clear head, to shout loudest, to forget
nothing, to keep his feet, and to stay as near the centre of the crowd as
possible, depended his “floor honour,” perhaps his fortune, or, what was
more to him, his client’s fortune. Nearly every man of them was a college
graduate who had won his spurs at athletics or a seasoned floor man whose
training had been even more severe than that of the college campus. When
it is known before the opening of the Exchange that there are to be
“things doing” in a certain stock, it is the rule to send only the picked
floor men into the crowd. There may be a fortune to make or to lose in a
minute or a sliver of a minute. For instance, the man who that morning was
able to snatch the first 5,000 shares sold at 140 could have resold them a
few minutes afterward at 152 and secured $60,000 profit. And the man who
was sent into the crowd by his client to sell 5,000 shares at the
“opening” and who got but 140, when the price would be 152 by the time he
reported to his customer, was a man to be pitied. Again, the trader who
the night before had decided that Sugar had gone up too fast, and who had
“shorted” (that is, sold what he did not have, with the intention of
repurchasing at a lower price than he sold it for) 5,000 shares at 140 and
who, finding himself in that surging mob with Sugar selling at 152, could
only get out by taking a loss of $60,000, or by taking another chance of
later paying 162—such a trader was also to be pitied.
No one who scanned the crowd that morning would have believed that the
calm, set face on that erect Indian figure, occupying the very centre of
that horde of gamblers who were only awaiting the ringing clang of the
gong to hurl themselves like madmen at each other, was the hysterical man
who the night before was wildly praying for this moment. Nearly every man
in that crowd was calm, but Bob Brownley was the calmest of them all. It’s
the Exchange code that at any cost of heart or nerve-tear a man must
retain good form until the gong strikes. Then, that he must be as near the
uncaged tiger as human mind and body can be made. Only I realised what
volcano raged inside my chum’s bosom. If any other man of the crowd had
known, Bob’s chances of success would have been on par with a Canadian
canoeist short-cutting Niagara for Buffalo. Nine-tenths of the Stock
Exchange game is not letting your left brain-lobe know what race your
right is in until the winning numbers and the also-rans are on the board.
If one of those three hundred chain-lightning thinkers or any of their
ten thousand alert associates knew in advance the intentions of a fellow
broker, the word would sweep through that crowd with the sureness of
uncorked ether, and the other two hundred and ninty nine, at gong-strike,
would be at each others’ throats for his vitals, and before he knew the
game had started would have his bones picked to a vulture-finish
cleanness. Suddenly, as I watched the scene, there rang through the great
hall the first sharp stroke of the gong. There were no echoes heard that