The Cinder Buggy (29 page)

He said it cynically, and it was distorted by John’s enemies, who took it to mean that he could not be trusted by his own crowd. That was not so. He never broke the code. Creed, as it turned out, was the only man who needed watching within the rules.

Fortuity was the stuff they worked in; hazard was what they played with. They were always betting. No game of chance or skill but they had to add stakes to make it interesting. As they grew richer and more easily bored it was increasingly difficult to find a pastime in which the stakes were high enough. John turned the leisure of their minds to horse racing. They would appear in a body on the race track and scare the bookmakers with the size of their wagers. John was their oracle. They never believed him; they only followed him. When he had involved them in enormous loss they were obliged to go on; there was no other hope of getting out but by his star of luck. And it was by no means infallible. Once at Saratoga they had a frightful week. Twice they had telegraphed home for money. Their losses had gone into six figures. Slaymaker met Awns, Wingreene, Pick and Creed on the hotel veranda after breakfast. He was exceedingly sore.

“As long as I live and have my senses I’ll never bet on another horse John picks,” he said. “He dreams these things. He never had a real tip in his life.”

They were all of one mind. They were through. Just then John’s voice reached them from the doorway, saying: “We’ll get it all back today.”

They groaned and turned their backs.

“No, now listen?” he said. “You always get cold feet at the wrong time. This is our chance. It’s air tight. It’s so secret I can’t even tell you what horse it is. Give me your money and I’ll bet it with mine.”

He sat down and went on with it until Slaymaker said: “I’m an imbecile. If anybody knew what an imbecile I am there would be a run on my bank. This is positively the last time.”

They all gave him their money. It was the third race. No more could he tell them. The horses went to the post and still they did not know which one carried their money.

“It’s on,” said John. “It’s down all right. Don’t worry about that.”

“Lord, no,” said Slaymaker. “That’s not what we are worried about.”

John watched the horses. The others watched him.

A horse named Leadbeater took the lead at the start, held all the way and won by four lengths. John fell back with a blank expression.

“That the horse?” asked Slaymaker.

“Yes,” said John. “That’s it.”

“Then what’s the matter?”

“I didn’t bet on it,” said John.

“You didn’t—what!”

“That was the horse,” John explained. “Only after we came out here I got what I thought was a better tip and bet all the money on... Now, wait!”

They would not wait. They rose with one impulse and left him alone in Saratoga. That night on the train they began
to
get telegrams from him. Would they authorize him to lay five thousand apiece for them on a horse that was bound to win the next day at odds of 100 to 1? They tore up the telegrams. More kept coming, overtaking them en route all that night and until noon the next day. They would not even reply. But that horse did win and John by himself broke half the bookmakers at Saratoga.

It was the end of their racing sport for that season. The crowd was too disgusted to touch it again and John did not care for it alone. Slaymaker said it was forever; so did all the rest. Yet the next season they did it all over again.

A
LL the men who got rich with John Breakspeare developed strange pathologies from nervous shock and strain. Their eyes became opaque and had that uncanny trick of suddenly and without movement changing their focus while they looked at you, as if something were transacting on the far-away horizon of their thoughts and you for that instant were transparent. They had their luck by the tail and could not let go. They could count their gains; they could not seize them. John was always getting them in; he never got them out. Their wealth was in property to which enormous additions had continuously to be made by an uncontrollable law of growth. Thus the richer they grew the greater correspondingly their liabilities were and there seemed no way either to quit or get out. If you had all the wealth in the world you could not sell it. There would be no one to buy it. In principle that was their problem. If they could sell out they would be millionaires. But where was there anybody with money enough to buy them out? It would take twenty-five millions or more. Once they had begun to look at this dilemma they could not let it alone; it filled them with anxiety. They began to worry John about it. He had got them in. Couldn’t he find a way to get them out?

“All right,” he said. “I’ll show you a way out.”

“How?”

“We’re like a railroad,” he said. “No railroad is privately owned any more. It’s too big. It represents too much capital. Only the public is rich enough to own a railroad. It takes thousands of investors putting their money together to build a railroad. Then somebody works it for them and pays them dividends on their shares. We can do that,—put our shares on the New York Stock Exchange and sell out to the public.”

So he led them to Wall Street. The motive was theirs; the plan was his.

The American Steel Company was reorganized. Its capitalization was increased to take in properties hitherto jointly owned among them and for other purposes. They agreed to sell no shares except through John in order that all should fare alike. It was a verbal agreement. All of their private agreements were verbal and never so far had one been broken.

Enter John Breakspeare upon the Wall Street scene with something to sell.

The shares of the American Steel Company were duly listed on the New York Stock Exchange,—that is, they were added to the list of securities permitted to be dealt in there and allotted sign and booth in the great investment bazar.

People stared and passed by. It was a strange sign not only because it was new but for the reason also that the public knew only mining and railroad shares. The day of industrial company shares had not come. John was a pioneer in that line. He was a vendor unused to the ways of this fair with merchandise nobody had ever seen before.

He was not disappointed. He knew, if anybody did, that goods must be brought to the buyer’s attention. Nothing will sell itself, least of all seven per cent, shares for which there is instinctively neither hunger nor thirst. He knew also in principle how this kind of impalpable merchandise should be displayed. It has no appeal to any of the natural senses. Therefore it must be made to appeal to all of them at once, symbolically. How?

First to be engaged is the sense of sight. The shares move. They go up. People ask: “What is that?” They move again. People ask: “Why is that?” They continue to move, going up, then down a little, then suddenly up a great deal, and people say: “Here before our eyes is something doing,—a chance to make some money.” And when once they begin to say that all their senses and appetites are touched with expectation, for money, however derived, is in itself palpable. It is the symbol of all things whatever.

For the art of making shares go up and down in a manner to excite first attention, then curiosity and then an impulse to act for gain, there is a long, inartistic word. The word is manipulation. The stock market manipulator is an illusionist. Perched high upon some eerie crag of the Wall Street canyon, producing enchantment at a distance, he is himself invisible save to the initiate, and even they do not know what he intends or why, because what he seems to be doing is never at all what he is really doing. If it were, the lesser fauna—the wolves, the jackals, the foxes, apes and crows,—would anticipate his ends and take the quarry out of his hands. He makes shares rise when he is selling them and fall when he is buying them. He can take an unnoticed, unwanted thing like American Steel and cause it to become an object of extravagant speculative interest, so that tens of thousands hang over the tape and wait for the next quotation, betting whether it shall be up or down. Moreover, he is a ventriloquist. When he has made certain shares very active by the apparently simple though extremely intricate expedient of buying and selling them furiously through different brokers, no two of whom know they have the same principal,—when he has done this and people begin to ask the question, then answers suitable to his purpose are in everyone’s ears, saturate the atmosphere, and although he, the manipulator, is the source of them that fact is as little known as the fact that he was himself the solitary source of all the buying and selling that started the excitement. Not only is the public deceived; the fauna, too, will often be caught. All is flesh that rises to his lure. His work is sometimes legitimate, as when he creates a public demand for shares the proceeds of which go to build a railroad or some other great economic work so vast that the capital could not have been obtained in any other way; it is sometimes predatory, sometimes wanton.

At this time the pendragon of manipulators was one Sabath,—James Sabath,—feared by the wicked and righteous both. He was not a member of the Stock Exchange for he did not wish to be bound by the rules. There was no name on his door nor was his name in any directory or book of celebrities. Yet it was constantly on the lips of all men concerned in gains and losses from speculation. One might have asked in every bank in Wall Street who and where this Sabath was and one’s inquiry would have been received with utter blankness. Yet there would have been hardly a banker in Wall Street, certainly no very important one, who had not had transactions with him of an extremely intimate and delicate nature. Such is the way of men in the money canyon.

For example, there was Bullguard. He was the great private banker of his time,—a kind of Caesar’s wife to the institution of American finance. His authority was absolute, his power was feudal and tyrannical. For him to have been seen in the society of Sabath would have been scandalous. Nobody would have known what to make of it. Yet in the pursuit of his ends he often engaged Sabath to do things he could not risk doing for himself. That again is the way of men in the little autonomous state which is Wall Street.

John sought an audience with Sabath. After long delay and much unnecessary mystery he was received in that strange man’s lair. Besides himself there was nothing in it except a ticker, some chairs and a worn Turkey carpet. The room was without windows, therefore lighted artificially in daytime. Twice during the interview he rang a bell and each time a boy appeared with one glass of whiskey in his hand. Sabath drank it at a gulp, with no here’s how or by your leave. He sat in an arm chair and combed his beard upward from its roots with his fingers, or for change twisted it with the other hand. His head was continually moving; sometimes he threw it far back to start his fingers through his beard; no matter what he did with his head his eyes all the time were perfectly still and held John in a blue, vise-like gaze. He looked at people in a way to make them feel full of holes. His head was very large; his body was neat and small; his voice was sarcastic, thin and shrill.

John explained his errand. He wished Sabath to take hold of American Steel shares and create some public interest in them. Sabath said nothing, but continued to look at him. John went into details, telling about the company, what it owned and what it earned. Still Sabath continued to gaze at him in silence. John told him at length how the shares had been pooled in his hands by his associates, none to be sold except through him. And Sabath said nothing.

“Does it interest you at all?” John asked at last.

“Come back tomorrow,” said Sabath. He made a gesture toward the door without looking at it. As John went he sat still, but for his head, which turned slowly in a reptilian manner.

To John’s surprise Sabath was vocal the next day and asked many questions in a high, twanging voice. Some of his questions were oblique and some apparently quite irrelevant. Suddenly he said:

“And so you know that God-fearing Creed, do you? You must know him very well. How much of this precious stock has Mr. Creed got?”

John told him. Sabath tweaked his beard, saying: “Who would imagine I’d ever be found in the same alley with a he-cat like Creed.”

“What’s the matter with him?” asked John.

“I say nothing against him,” Sabath answered. “I only say I’d hate to go into a room with him alone.”

There was a third interview, then a fourth and a fifth. Terms were stated. It seemed to be all ready for the signatures and as there weren’t going to be any signatures John couldn’t understand why Sabath kept postponing the final word. Then one day out of a painted sky he said: “We seem unable to make a trade, Mr. Breakspeare. I cannot allow myself to waste any more of your valuable time. I’m not interested.”

John was amazed.

“However,” he said, “I suppose I can trust you to keep to yourself the information you have obtained in the course of these interviews?”

“That’s what we live on down here,—trust,” said Sabath. “We couldn’t do business without it.”

With that he turned his back and stood looking at the ticker. John, thus rudely dismissed, was at the door with his hand on the knob when Sabbath spoke again, without turning around, without moving his head, as if he were thinking out loud.

“What did you ever do to Mr. Bullguard?”

“I don’t know him,” said John. “Why?”

“He knows you,” said Sabath, still reading the tape. “He says you are a gambler. Is that true?”

“I don’t know what he means,” said John. “It would be absurd to talk about it. I have some business to transact in Wall Street. How does that concern him?”

Sabath now turned and walked with him to the door. His manner was both ingratiating and menacing; his voice was ironic, and yet there was a suspicion of friendliness in his words. “Because if you are,” he continued, as if John had not spoken, “I would urge you to keep all that talent for the steel business. I understand the steel business needs it. We don’t like gambling in Wall Street. You are a young man. I have wasted your time. Now I offer you my advice. Don’t try anything in Wall Street. Gamblers don’t go far down here. We eat them. Mr. Bullguard would swallow you up at one bite.” He made an exaggerated bow. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do for you before you go back to Pittsburgh.”