"How do you know you got out?" asked Blackie, passing over as a matter of no moment whatever the fact that all their neighbors of Truscot and Mapes Counties, who had followed "Judge" Wallingford's lead and urging in the matter of speculation, would lose their all; as would hundreds if not thousands of other "members" who had been led through the deftly worded columns of the Commercial Farmer to gamble in their own grain.
"Easy," explained J. Rufus. "The quotations themselves tell it. Fox & Fleecer had instructions to unload at a dollar twenty-five, and they follow such instructions absolutely. They began unloading at that price, buying in at the same time for my farmers, and, in spite of the fact that they were pitching nearly two million bushels of wheat on the market after it hit the twenty-five mark, it went on up to thirty-four before it broke, showing that the buying orders until that time were in excess of selling orders. The farmers throughout the country simply ate up my two million bushels of wheat."
"Then it's their money you got, after all," observed Blackie.
"It's mine now," responded J. Rufus with a chuckle. "I saw it first."
CHAPTER XXV
MR. FOX SOLVES HIS GREAT PROBLEM, AND MR. WALLINGFORD FALLS WITH A THUD
They arrived in Chicago late and they arose late. At breakfast, with languid interest, Wallingford picked up the paper that lay beside his plate, and the first item upon which his eyes rested was a sensational article headed: "BROKER SUICIDES." Even then he was scarcely interested until his eye caught the name of Edwin H. Fox.
"What is the matter?" asked his wife anxiously, as, with a startled exclamation, he hastily pushed back his chair and arose. It was the first time that she had ever in any emergency seen his florid face turn ghastly pale. Dilemmas, reverses and even absolute defeats he had always accepted with a gambler's coolness, but now, since his vanity had let him dignify his pursuit of other people's money by the name of financiering, the blow came with crushing force; for it maimed not only his pocketbook but his pride as it swept away the glittering air castles that he had been building for the past year.
"Matter!" he spluttered, half choking. "We are broke!" And leaving his breakfast untasted he hastily ordered a cab and drove to the office of Fox & Fleecer, devouring the details of the tragedy as he went. The philanthropic Mr. Fox, he of the glistening bald pate and the air of cold probity, the man who had been for thirty years in business at the old stand, who had seemed as firm as a rock and as unsusceptible as a quart of clams, had been leading not only a double but a sextuple life, for half a dozen pseudo-widows mourned his demise and the loss of a generous banker. To support all these expensive establishments, which, once set up, firmly declined to ever go out of existence, Mr. Fox had been juggling with the money of his customers; robbing Peter to pay Paul, until the time had come when Paul could be no longer paid and there was only one debt left that he could by any possibility wipe out – the debt he owed to Nature. That he had paid with a forty-four caliber bullet through the temple. At last he had solved that perplexing problem which had bothered him all these years.
Wallingford had expected to find the office of Fox & Fleecer closed, but the door stood wide open and the dingy apartment was filled with a crowd of men, all equally nervous but violently contrasted as to complexion, some of them being extremely pale and some extremely flushed, according to their temperaments. Mr. Fleecer, one of those strangest of all anomalies, a nervous fat man, stood behind Mr. Fox's desk, his collar wilted with perspiration and the flabby pouches under his eyes black from his vigil of the night. He was almost as large as Wallingford himself, but a careless dresser, and a pitiable object as he started back on hearing Wallingford's name, tossing up his right hand with a curious involuntary motion as if to ward off a blow. His crisp, quick voice, however, did not fit at all with his appearance of crushed indecision.
"I might as well tell you the blunt truth at first, Mr. Wallingford," he said. "You haven't a cent, so far as Fox & Fleecer is concerned. Nobody has. I haven't a dollar in the world and Fox was head over heels in debt, I find. How that sanctimonious old hypocrite ever got away with it all these years is the limit. I looked after the buying and selling orders as he gave them to me, and never had anything to do with the books. I never knew when a deal was in the office until I received market orders. I have spent all night on Fox's private accounts, however, and since yours was the largest item, I naturally went into it as deeply as I could. If they had telephones in Hell I could give you more accurate information, but the way I figure it is this: when he got hold of your four hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars with instructions to buy and not to close until it reached a dollar and a quarter, he evidently classed your proposition as absurd. There was absolutely nothing to make wheat go to that price, and, with the big margin you had put up, he figured that the account would drag along at least until September, without being touched; so he used what he had to have of the money to cover up his other steals, expecting to juggle the market with the rest of it on his own judgment, and expecting, in the end, to have it back to hand to you when you got tired. When he understood this upward movement, however, and saw the big thing you had done, he jumped into the market with what was left, something less than three hundred thousand dollars. The only way to make that up to the amount you should have by the time it reached a dollar and a quarter was to pyramid it, and this he did. He bought on short margin, closed when he had a good profit, and spread the total amount over other short margin purchases. He did this three times. On the last deal he had upward of five million bushels bought to your account, and it was this strong buying, coupled with the other buying orders which came in at about the dollar-and-a-quarter mark, that sent the market up to a dollar thirty-four. If the market could have held half an hour he would have gotten out all right and turned over to you a million dollars, after using two hundred and fifty thousand for his own purposes, but when he attempted to unload the market broke; and by – we're all broke!"
Mr. Wallingford laughed, quite mechanically, and from his pocket drew two huge black cigars with gold bands around them.
"Have a smoke," he said to Mr. Fleecer.
Lighting his own Havana he turned and elbowed his way out of the room. One of the men who had stood near him exchanged a wondering stare with his neighbor.
"That's the limit of gameness," he observed.
But he was mistaken. It was not gameness. Wallingford was merely dazed. He could find no words to express the bitter depth to which he had fallen. As he passed out through the ticker-room he glanced at the blackboard. The boy was just chalking up the latest morning quotation on September wheat – a dollar twelve.
In the cab he opened his pocketbook and counted the money in it. Before he had started on this trip he had scarcely thought of money, except that at Fox & Fleecer's there would be waiting for him a cool, clean million. Instead of that he found himself with exactly fifty-four dollars.
Mrs. Wallingford was in her room, pale to the lips.
"How much money have you?" he asked her.
Without a word she handed him her purse. A few small bills were in it. She handed him another small black leather case which he took slowly. He opened it, and from the velvet depths there gleamed up at him the old standby – her diamonds. He could get a couple of thousand dollars on these at any time. He put the case in his pocket, but without any gleam of satisfaction, and sat down heavily in one of the huge leather-padded chairs.
"Fanny," said he savagely, "never preach to me again! I have tried a straight-out legitimate deal and it dumped me. Hereafter, be satisfied with whatever way I make money, just so long as I have the law on my side. Why," and his indignation over this last reflection was beyond expression, "I've coaxed a carload of money out of the farmers of this country, and I don't get away with a cent of it! A thief got it! A thief and a grafter!"
Mrs. Wallingford did not answer him. She was crying. It was not so much that they had lost all of this money, it was not that he had spoken harshly to her for almost the first time since he had come into her life, but the shattering once more of certain hopeful dreams that had grown up within her since their sojourn in Battlesburg. Of course, he was instantly regretful and made such clumsy amends as he could, but the sting, not of bitterness but of sorrow, was there, and it remained for long after; until, in fact, she came to realize how much to heart her husband had taken his only real defeat. For the first time in his life he became despondent. The height to which he had aspired and had almost reached, looked now so utterly unattainable that the contemplation of it took out of him all ambition, all initiative, all life. He seemed to have lost his creative faculty. Where his fertile brain had heretofore teemed with plans and projects, crowding upon each other, clamoring for fulfilment, now he seemed incapable of thought, and fell into an apathy from which he could not arouse himself no matter how hard he tried. Parting company with Blackie Daw, who seemed equally rudderless, they moved aimlessly about from city to city, pawning Mrs. Wallingford's diamonds as they needed the money, but the man's spirit was gone, and no matter how often he changed his environment or brought himself into contact with new fields and new opportunities, no plan for getting back upon his feet seemed to offer itself. He was too much disheartened, in fact, even to try. To husband their fast waning resources they even descended to living in boarding houses, where the brief gratification of exciting awe among the less impressive boarders was but small compensation for the loss of the luxury to which they had been used.
It was the sight of a miserable dinner in one of these boarding houses that proved the turning point for him. His chair was drawn back from the table for him when he suddenly shoved it to its place again, and with a darkening brow stalked out of the dining room, followed by the bewildered Mrs. Wallingford.
"I can't stand this thing, Fanny," he declared. "I've insulted my stomach with that sort of fodder until it's too late for an apology."
"What are you going to do?" she asked in concern.
"Go where the good steaks grow," he answered emphatically. "We're going to pack up and move to the best hotel in town and eat ourselves blue in the face, and to-morrow J. Rufus is going to go back on the job. I haven't the money in my pocket to pay for it, and we haven't another thing we can soak, but if I run up a hotel bill I'll have to get out and dig to pay it, and that's what I need. I'm lazy."
It was a positive elation to him to dash up in a cab to a palatial hotel, to walk into its gilded and marble corridors with a deferential porter carrying his luggage, to loom up before a suave clerk in his impressive immensity and sign his name with a flourish, to demand the best accommodations they had in the house and to be shown into apartments that bathed him once more in a garish atmosphere where everything tasted and felt and smelled of money. It was like the prodigal son coming home again, and instantly his spirits arose with a bound. He began as of old to live like a lord, and though the long sought idea did not come to him for almost two weeks, he held to the untroubled tenor of his way with all his old arrogance, blessed with a cheerful belief that some lucky solution of his difficulties would be found.
One thing alone bothered him toward the last, and that was the rapid disappearance of such little ready money as he needed for tips when he was in the hotel, and for drinks and cigars when he found himself away from it. He was sensitive about ordering inferior goods in good places, and when away from his source of credit supplies, took to turning in at obscure cigar stores, preferring to buy the best they had rather than to taking a second grade in a better place. It was in one of these obscure little establishments that the elusive inspiration at last came to him.
"The government is rotten!" the stoop-shouldered cigar maker had complained just a moment before, rasping the air of his dingy little store with a high-pitched voice that was almost a whine. "It fosters consolidations. Big profits for rich men and bankruptcy for poor men, that's what we have come to!"
The stoop-shouldered cigar maker had no chin worth mentioning, and grew a thin, down-pointed mustache which accentuated that lack. He wore a green eye-shade and an apron of bed ticking, and he held in his hand a split mold, gripping the two parts together while he feebly and hopelessly groped for an inspiration in the mending line. The flabby man in the greasy vest, who was playing solitaire with a pack of cards so grimy that it took an experienced eye to tell whether the backs or the faces were up, did not raise his head, nor did the apathetic young man with the chronic dent in his time-yellowed Derby, who, sitting motionless with his crossed arms resting on his knees, had been making a business of watching the solitaire game in silence.
"That's right," agreed the flabby man, laying the trey of diamonds carefully upon the four of clubs and peeping to see what the next card would have been; "all the laws are against the poor man, and we're ground right down."
A pimple-faced youngster, clearly below the legal age, came in and bought two cigarettes for a cent, and the cigar maker waited upon him in sour-visaged nonchalance; neither the solitaire expert nor his interested watcher raised his eyes; a young man with a flashy tie and a soiled collar bought three stogies for a nickel and still apathy reigned; then Wallingford's huge bulk darkened the open doorway and everybody woke up.
Wallingford was so large that he seemed to crowd the little shop and absorb all its light, and he approached the cigar case doubtingly, surveying its contents with the eye of a connoisseur. A brand or two that he knew quite well he passed over, for the boxes were nearly empty and no doubt had been reeking for a long time in that sponge-moistened assortment of flavors, but finally he settled upon a newly opened box from which but two cigars had been sold, and tapped his finger on the glass above it. The cigar maker reached in for that box with alacrity, for they were two-for-a-quarter goods, and as he brought them forth he gave to the buyer the appreciative scrutiny due one of so impressive appearance. He did not know that under his inspection the big man winced. In the fine scarf there should have glowed a huge diamond; the scarf itself had two or three frayed threads; the binding of the hat brim was somewhat worn; the cuffs were a little ragged. Wallingford felt that all the world saw this unwonted condition, but still he smiled richly; and the cigar dealer saw only richness. Probably the imposing customer would have left the store in the same silence in which he had made his purchase, but, as he stopped to fastidiously cut the tip from one of his cigars, an undersized but pompous young collector bustled in and threw down a bill.
"Hundred Blue Rings," he announced curtly.
With a mechanical curiosity, Wallingford glanced into the case where a box of cigars with cheap blue bands was displayed. The cigar maker opened his money drawer and slowly counted out a pile of small silver.
"Three fifty," he lifelessly whined as he shoved it over, and the collector receipted the bill, dashing out with the same absurd self-assertiveness with which he had come in.
"Thirty-five a thousand," observed Wallingford incredulously. "That price is claimed for every nickel cigar on earth, but I always thought it was phoney. It's a stiff rate, isn't it?"
"It's a hold up," snarled the other, "but I got to keep 'em. I make a better cigar myself but people don't know anything about tobacco. They only smoke advertising. Here's my cigar," and he set a box on the case; "Ed Nickel's Nickelfine. There's a piece of real goods."
The big man picked one out of the box, and twirled it in his deft fingers with a scrutiny that betokened keen judgment of all small articles of manufacture.
"It's well made," he admitted; "but what's the use? I could deliver your week's output in my pocket, and on the way back could spend the money getting my shoes shined; all because you haven't the wherewith to advertise."
"I got a little money," insisted the other aggressively, touched on a point of pride; "money I saved and pinched and scraped together; but it ain't enough to push a cigar. Some of these big manufacturers spread around a fortune on a new brand before they sell a single box. There's John Crewly & Company. They spent a hundred thousand dollars advertising Blue Rings."
"And you small dealers have handed it back to them," laughed Wallingford. "You pay that advertising difference above what the cigar is worth."
"Ten times over!" exploded Mr. Nickel. "The houses that buy in big quantities get them for below twenty-eight, I've heard. But that's where the government is rotten! It's fixed so the little man always gets it in the neck. Combines and trusts eat us up. Every man that joins a consolidation ought to get ten years at hard labor."
"Don't grouch," advised Wallingford, grinning; "consolidate. If all the small dealers in this town formed a consolidation, they could buy their supplies in quantity for spot cash and get the lowest price going."
Ed Nickel looked out of the window at the clanging street cars and digested this palatable new idea.
"I reckon they could," he mused, "if there was any way to work it so they wouldn't all spike each other trying to get the best of it," and J. Rufus chuckled as he recognized this business anarchist's willingness to undergo an instant change of opinion about consolidation.
The door opened, and a tall, thin man, with curly gray hair and a little gray goatee, strode nervously in and threw a half dollar on the case.
"Two packs of Kiosks," he demanded.
Almost in the same breath he saw Wallingford, whose face was at that moment illuminated by the lighter to which he held his cigar.
"J. Rufus, by Heck!" he exclaimed.
Before Wallingford could give voice to his amazement the strangely altered Blackie Daw was shaking hands eagerly with him.
"You probably don't remember me," went on Blackie with an expansive grin. "Rush is the name. I. B. Rush, and I never was so bug-house glad to see anybody in my life!"
The eyes of Wallingford twinkled.
"Well, well, well, Mr. Rush! How you have changed!" he declared.
Blackie shook his head warningly.
"Nix on the advertisement," he cautioned. "Wallingford, you're the long-sought message from home! Feel in your vest pocket and see if there isn't an overlooked hundred or two down in the corner."
J. Rufus was cheerful, nay, happy, complaisance itself.
"Certainly, Mr. Rush," he said heartily; "a thousand if you want it. Just step over to the bank with me till I draw the money," and they walked out of the door.
With a sigh the flabby man laid the long-suspended jack of hearts upon the queen of spades.
"Hear the big guy tossin' over a thousand like it was car fare," he observed. "If I had a piece of lead pipe I'd follow him."
"What do you suppose his graft is?" queried the watcher at the game.
"He's made his money off poor people; that's what!" announced Ed Nickel. "How else does a man get rich?"
CHAPTER XXVI
J. RUFUS SCENTS A FORTUNE IN SMOKE AND LETS MR. NICKEL SEE THE FLAMES
Wallingford had good cause to survey his friend with amused wonder.
"How you have aged, Blackie," he chuckled. "What has turned you gray in a single month?"
"Beating it," replied Blackie, hoarsely. "Did you see that guy just now look around and give me the X-ray stare?"
"He was only admiring your handsome make-up," retorted J. Rufus. "What's got your nerve all of a sudden?"
"Nerve!" scorned the other. "Say, J. Rufus, when I cut my finger I bleed yellow, and the mere sight of a brass button gives me hydrophobia. They're after me, dear friend of my childhood days, for going into the oil-well industry without any oil wells, and you're the first human being I've seen in three weeks that didn't look like he had the iron bracelets in his pocket. Even you're a living frost. For a minute you gave me that glad feeling, but when you said to come around to the bank and I could have a thousand, I knew it was all off. If you'd had it, nothing but paralysis would have stopped you from putting your hand in your pocket and making a flash with the two hundred I wanted. I have to make a quick get-away from this town or have the door of a nice steel bedroom locked from the outside!"
Solemnly J. Rufus drew from his pocket his total supply of earthly wealth, a ten-dollar bill and the change he had received at the cigar store.
"I'll give you the ten," he offered, "although I'm glued to the floor myself."
"I can see it, for your sparks are gone," said Mr. Daw, glumly looking his friend over from head to foot as he pocketed the ten. "How did the beans get spilled? I thought there was a fresh crop of your particular breed of come-ons every morning."
"I'm overtrained," explained J. Rufus with cheerful resignation. "I used to be able to jump into a town with ten dollars in my pocket, and have to lock myself in my room to keep 'em from forcing money on me faster than I could take it; but I've lost my winning ways, I guess. The fact of the matter is, Blackie, I need an oculist. I can't see small enough since the big blow-up. I had climbed too high, and when I tumbled off the perch I fell so hard I couldn't see anything but stars. A dollar is small as a pea now, and perfectly silent, and it takes at least a thousand to emit even a faint click. I can't learn to pike again."
"I wish I could learn anything else," complained Mr. Daw in disgust. "Why, blind-men's tincups look like fat picking to me, and my yellow streak shows through so strong that I cross the street every time I see a push cart; I'm afraid the banana men will make a mistake and pull my fingers off. Say! See that mug over there on the corner with his back to us? Well, that's a plain-clothes man. I know him all right and he knows me. It's Jimmy Rogers and I can't hand him a sou to plug his memory!"
Blackie was visibly distressed and edged around the corner.
"I should say you had developed a saffron streak," observed J. Rufus, eying him with a trace of contempt. "I wouldn't have known you till you spoke. Come on and we'll go right straight past Jimmy Rogers."
He put his hand behind Blackie's elbow to take him in that direction, but to his surprise Daw shrank back.
"Not for mine!" he declared. "I know I'm due, but I won't go till they come after me. Why, J. Rufus, do you know we're all that's left of the old bunch? Billy Riggs, Tommy Rance, Dick Logan, Pit Hardesty – all put away, for stretches of from five to twenty years! And Jim, mind what I say; our turn's next! There, he's turning this way! I'm on the lope. Me for the first train out of town. Good-by, old man."
He shook hands hastily and, drawn-chested, plunged down the side street at a swift pace. Wallingford looked after him and involuntarily expanded his own broad chest as he turned in the direction of his hotel. He looked back at Ed Nickel's cigar store after a few steps, and hesitated as if he might return, but he did not. On the way he counted five such establishments, and he peered keenly into each one of them. They were all of a little better grade than the one he had visited, but none of them was stocked in such manner as to tell of wholesale purchases and cash discounts. Suddenly he chuckled. At last he had the detail for his heretofore vague idea, and it was a draught of strong wine to him. He had been the high jester of finance, always, and once more the bells upon his cap jingled merrily. Inspired, he walked into his hotel with a swaggering assurance entirely out of keeping with the lonely two dollars in his pocket. The clerk had been instructed to look after Wallingford, for though he had been an extravagant guest for within a day of two weeks, no one but the bellboys and waiters had seen a penny of his money – and his bill was nearly two hundred dollars. The clerk firmly intended to call to him if he strode past on the far side of the lobby, as had been his custom in the past two or three days; but he did not need to call, for J. Rufus approached the desk without invitation, beaming as he turned toward it, but growing stern as he neared it.
"The wine I had served in my rooms last night was vile," he charged. "If I cannot get the brand of champagne I want, have it perfectly frappé when it gets to my apartments, and secure better service all around, I shall pay my bill and leave!"
The clerk touched a bell instantly.
"Very sorry, Mr. Wallingford," said he. "I shall speak to the wine steward about the matter at once."
J. Rufus grunted in acknowledgment of this apology, and with a feeling of relief the clerk surveyed that broad back as it retreated in immeasurable dignity. There was no need to worry about the money of a man who took that attitude. On the way to his suite, however, J. Rufus, as he handed the elevator boy a quarter with one hand, drew down his cuff furtively with the other, under the impulse of a sudden idea, and, grinning, looked at his cuff button. It was diamond studded, and he ought to be able to raise at least twenty-five apiece on the pair.
Mrs. Wallingford was sewing when her capable husband came in. Something in the very movement of the door caused her to look up with an instant knowledge that he brought good news, and a sight of his face confirmed the impression. She smiled at him brightly, and yet with a trace of apprehension. There had come over her a curious change of late. Her color was as clear as ever, even clearer, for it seemed to have attained a certain pure transparency, but there seemed, too, a slight pallor beneath it, and her eyes were strangely luminous.
"I got the fog out of my conk to-day, Fanny," he said exultantly. "It seemed as if I never would be able to frame up a good business stunt again, but it hit me at last. How do you like this place?"
"I can't tell," she slowly returned. "I haven't seen much of it, you know."
"You will," he laughed. "You may pick out any part of it you like, because I think I'll settle down here for good."
She looked up with a little gasp.
"Then you're going into a – a real business?" she faltered.
"A hundred of them," he boasted. "I've just decided to rake off half the profits of all this town's cigar stores, except a few of the best ones, and stay right here to collect. The hundred or more ought to yield me one or two dollars a day apiece. Looks good, don't it?"
"I'm so glad," she said simply. It never occurred to either of them to doubt that he could do what he had planned, and just now she was less inclined than ever to inquire into details. She sat, her hands folded in the fluffy white goods upon her lap, with a deepening color in her cheeks.
"I'll tell you why I'm glad we are to settle down at last and have a real home," she said suddenly, and, arising, advanced to him and shook out the dainty article upon which she had been sewing, holding it outstretched before him so that he could gather its full import.
"What?" he gasped.
She nodded her head, half crying and half laughing, and suddenly buried her head upon his shoulder, sobbing. He clasped her in his arms, tiny white garment and all, and looked on over her head, out of the window at the gathering dusk in the sky where it stretched down between the tall buildings. For just one fleeting second a trace of the Eternal Mystery came to awe him, but it passed and left him grinning.
"I'd just been figuring on a new house," he observed, "but I guess I'll have to plan it all over now."
He led her to a chair presently, and went back to the window, where he stood until the darkness warned him that it was time to dress for dinner. The meal finished, he sat down to write, tearing up sheet after sheet of paper and crumpling it into the waste basket until far into the night, and later he sent down for a city directory, making out a list of cigar stores, dropping out those that were printed in black-face type; but whatever he did he paused once in a while to turn toward that tiny white garment upon the table and survey it with smiling wonder.
In the morning he called upon a job printer of reputation, and then he went again to Ed Nickel's cigar store; but this time he dashed up to the door in a showy carriage drawn by two good horses. The same flabby man sat in the corner playing solitaire as if he had never left off, and the same apathetic young man with the dent in his hat was watching him. The split cigar mold had not yet grown together, though Ed Nickel still held its two parts matched tightly in his left hand. Upon the entrance of Wallingford the magnificent, however, the three graven figures, glancing first upon him and then upon the carriage, inhaled the breath of life. The solitaire player suddenly pushed his cards together and began shuffling them over and over and over and over, though he had not yet exhausted the possibilities of the previous game. The apathetic young man stood up to yawn but changed his mind after he had his mouth open. Ed Nickel bowed, smiled and hurried behind his counter.
"What will you take for your business, Mr. Nickel?" asked J. Rufus, throwing a coin on the case and tapping his finger over the box from which he had purchased the cigars the night before. Freshly shaven, he wore a new collar, a new shirt with fine, crisp cuffs, and a new silk lavender tie – also plain new cuff buttons.