III
It was after the opening of the stock-market and most of the early orders had been executed. The rush had given place to the calm efficiency of a well-organized broker's office. Mr. Robison walked into the Customers' Room, approached Gilbert Witherspoon, a valued customer, touched his hat-brim with two fingers in the French military fashion, and said:
“Please, where's Mr. Richards?” His nasal twang and his Parisian appearance produced the usual impression of striking incongruity upon all men within hearing distance. Everybody frankly listened.
“That's his private office,” answered Witherspoon, non-committally, pointing his finger at a door.
“Thank you very much!” said Robison and bowed. Then he knocked, heard a peremptory “Come in!” and disappeared within.
Witherspoon, who cultivated a reputation as a wit—there is a buffoon in every stock-broker's office—shrugged his shoulders Frenchily, and, in a nasal voice obviously in imitation of Robison, said:
“Another world-beater!”
“You never can tell,” retorted Dan McCormack, oracularly. He was fat, always played “mysteries” in the market—traded in those stocks the movements in which were unaccounted for—and he did not like Witherspoon.
Inside Mr. Robison had said “Bon jour!” and bowed so very low that Mr. Richards immediately thought of the language of a fashionable bill of fare.
“Wie geht's?” retorted Richards, jocularly. Then, nicely serious, “How are you this morning?”
“Don't I look it?” said Mr. Robison. “I am, of course, perplexed.”
“What's the trouble?”
“The usual trouble when I try to beat the stock-market—embarras de richesses.”
“It is an embarrassment that most people would welcome.”
“Tut! The more elaborate the menu is in a good restaurant the greater your indecision as to which particular dish you will order! Well, I went through the Menagerie!” There was a catarrhal despair in his voice.
“Yes?”
“And I am undecided between four.”
Robison looked anxiously at the broker, and Richards felt such an annoyance as a man might feel if compelled at the point of a pistol to listen to the reading of one hundred pages of the city directory. But he smiled tolerantly, for he had the professional amiability indispensable to men whose business consists of making money and of consoling clients for losing money.
“Four what?” he asked.
“Four sure ways.”
“Which four?” asked Richards. He managed to convey both that he was dying to listen and that the rest of the world did not exist for him.
“The Ant, the Spider, the Beaver, and the Lion. Out of the nineteen combinations in the Menagerie I've narrowed my choice to these four. You know conditions better than I and probably have seen the Cribbage Board. Have you a choice?” He looked at Richards so eagerly, and withal so shrewdly and sanely, that in self-defense the broker said:
“I can't say that I have. Of course I am bullish—”
“Of course. But the question is: Which—in a week?”
Richards had no idea what was meant by this man with the sane eyes who said crazy things through his nose—a man who had one hundred thousand dollars to his credit with the firm. Perplexed to the verge of exasperation, Richards was stock-broker enough—when in doubt, bluff!—to say, with a frown, “Yes, that's the question: Which—in a week?” He shook his head as though he were trying to pick out the best for his beloved Robison.
“I never was so puzzled in my life, and I want you to know that I've made money even in Rumanian bonds!”
“I'm afraid I can't help you much.”
“What does the I. S. Board say?”
“Mr. Robison, exactly what do you mean by the I. S. Board?”
“What? You don't know the International Syndicate Cribbage Board! Then how in Hades do you pick your combinations?”
“We buy and sell stocks on our judgment of basic conditions or for special reasons.”
“Ah, yes—like the public. You base your trades on gas and guess. Well, I don't! I'd play the Ant, but I don't see the Granary full in a week. Jay Gould had a perfect mania for it; it was an obsession with him. And yet he seldom won commensurately with his risks. In the Northwest corner he was tied up over a year and lost more than a million. I guess we'll dispense with the Ant, though it looks so safe for the Granger group.”
Robison seemed to be thinking aloud rather than asking for advice. But Richards, who was a Wall Street man to his finger-tips, said, gravely, “I think you are right.”
Robison nodded, to show he had heard, and went on: “The situation in the Pacific Coast, of course, suggests the Beaver at once. I can see the Dam in Union Pacific; but I don't like to try it so soon after the Rothschilds worked it so openly in Berlin over the Agadir excuse. Too many people who have access to the Menagerie remember it. I realize all this, but,” he finished, with profound regret, “it is such a cinch!”
“Yes. But—” Richards shook his head in sympathy. He felt that he ought to humor this man; moreover, business was quiet, and this man was saying incomprehensible things that would be repeated by Richards, with sensational success, at luncheons and dinners for weeks.
“Of course, the Spider is the oldest stand-by. Personally I never liked it. In the Governor Flower boom and, indeed, up to the Northern Pacific panic, its popularity was due to John W. Gates. But do you know, Mr. Richards, I have always believed that in the first two Steel and Wire coups and in the Louisville & Nashville affair, Gates hit upon it by accident. Else,” pursued Mr. Robison, controversially, “why was he pinched so badly in 1901 and again in 1907? He hit upon it, after he got out of Federal Steel, by accident, I tell you! He was a man of genius and courage, but it was all instinct with him. He was no student, sir—no student!”
“I've always said,” observed Mr. George B. Richards, “that Gates was not a student!” He glared, thereby successfully defying contradiction.
“It leaves the Lion!” muttered Robison. “Should I try it? And which Peg?”
“I'd try it!” counseled Richards, who was not only intelligent, but had a sense of humor.
“Would you, really?”
“Yes, I certainly would!” And the broker looked as if he certainly meant it.
“It's the Dutch favorite,” said Robison, musingly. “And they are a very clever people. You know Van Vollenhoven in his book says that once a year, for thirteen consecutive years, the great Cornelius Roelofs, of Amsterdam, made a million gulden in London by the Lion—the most hopeful pessimist in the history of stock speculation! It comes easy to the phlegmatic Hollanders, but Americans are too nervous to take kindly to it. I once begged the late Addison Cammack to join me in a Lion deal, but he didn't. He was not very well at the time. Anyhow, he was too American.”
“Did you know him?”
“Like a book! Dangerous man to follow! Cynicism sounds impressive, but is wind. You don't win in the stock-market with catch phrases, but with combinations.”
“Do you use charts?”
“A stock speculator is not a navigator, but all commission-houses should have a chart. With some customers, after you have exhausted every other invitation, you can use the chart to get them trading. But not for us, Mr. George B. Richards. I think you will soon realize that I am in this affair not to lose money, but to make it. I shall, therefore, either buy Dock Island, sell Middle Pacific, buy National Smelting, or sell Consolidated Steel. I'll have a pad of special order-slips made so you will not mistake my orders for those of any one else. You will execute for me no order that is not written and signed by me on such a slip. I'll keep up my margin. We'll operate on a ten-per-cent, basis; and I hereby authorize you to sell me out when my margin is down to six points. That gives you ample safety. It is really unnecessary, as I never lose; but I always protect the broker. The sudden death by heart disease of Baron Lespinasse in 1883 sent into bankruptcy the great firms of La Croissade et Cie. and Mayer, Dreyfus et Cie., of Paris, Ver-brugghe Frères, of Brussels, and about a dozen smaller houses. Mine, to be sure, is a trifling operation, designed to supply a modest income to an old flame. But I may—who knows?—decide to take a few millions back with me. And your firm, Mr. Richards, will be my principal brokers.”
Mr. Robison said this so impressively, so much as though he had made the firm of Richards & Tuttle rich beyond the dreams of avarice, that George B. found it easy to look grateful as he said, “Thank you, Mr. Robison.” It would be worth while watching this mysterious man, to see, first, if he made money; and if he did, how!
“I'll write it here and now. If my margins are down to six points at any time close me out, for I shall have been mistaken, which is a sign I've gone crazy; or I shall be dead, in which case protect yourself!”
Mr. Robison wrote out the instructions, signed them, and gave them to Mr. Richards. He must have noticed a look of uncertainty or dissatisfaction on the broker's face, for he said:
“I have no desire to pose before you as an unfailing winner, though I assure you I seldom lose. It is not brains, but carefulness. If you know nothing about the International Syndicate's information collecting machinery, why, just take my word for it that there are people in this world who don't work on the hit-or-miss plan. We don't eliminate all possibilities of failure; we merely reduce them to a negligible minimum. We cannot prevent all accidents, but we can and do foresee some of them. This sounds crazy to you, I know—no, don't deny it!—but all I can say is that your natural suspicions don't affect your kindness and courtesy, and I am more grateful than I can say. Of course, my own operations here will be conducted with your approval, in strict accordance with the rules of the New York Stock Exchange.”
“Oh, I am sure I haven't doubted your sanity,” said the broker, who had been much reassured by Mr. Robison's look of frankness and earnestness as he spoke. “I have merely suspected the depths of my own ignorance.”
“Your retort is both kind and clever. I thank you. I shall have to borrow one of your clerks or office-boys between nine-forty and ten a. m., to whom I may give my orders to bring to this office, and also ask you to recommend to me some young man who is intelligent but honest, wide awake but deaf to the ticker.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I shall need a young man who can watch certain developments and at the crucial moment will hasten to me without stopping on the way to take advantage in the stock-market of what he has learned while working for me.”
“I shall let you have one of my own clerks. He'll do as he is told.”
“That is not always to be taken as praise—but I thank you. There will be some telegrams come for me. Will you kindly see that they are held? Good morning!” And he left the room.
An hour later cablegrams and telegrams by the dozen began to come in for Robison, care Richards & Tuttle. But Robison did not return to the office until after the close of the stock-market.
“Any messages?” he asked Richards.
“Not over a hundred!” answered the broker, smilingly. He felt less suspicious after the telegrams began to arrive; they were tools he understood.
“I used the Triple Three,” explained Robison, opening telegram after telegram; the cables he seemed to leave for the last. The telegrams were, as Richards later ascertained, from San Francisco, Seattle, Tacoma, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, Vancouver, and other points west of the Rockies. Each contained but one word, but always the word ended in “less,” such, for example, as Headless, Toothless, Tailless, Nerveless. All were signed in the same way, to wit: Three-Three-Three.
“No Beaver! I'm just as glad,” Robison mused aloud and took up the cablegrams. They were from London, Paris, Berlin, Frankfort, and Amsterdam. They were in code, but he seemed to have the key by heart. The very last one made him thoughtful.
He handed the cablegram absently to Richards and said, “The Lion after all—and artificial at that!” He seemed to be lost in thought, oblivious of his whereabouts, as Richards read:
Robison, care Richtut:
Mogulgar wind Lloyd Vast Nigger Shaw twice home urban sweet Edward.
“Code, hey?”
“Lion! Oh! Code, did you say? No. Code is too risky. Plain reading! Of course I have more practice than you. Give it to one of your office-boys to decipher. If he succeeds give him fifty dollars and charge it to my account. But what I can't tell is the politics of it. Is it collusion, philanthropy, or fear? Is it wise? After all, the unusual is not necessarily dangerous. I shall double my money within four days and you will make the commissions in a perfectly simple, legitimate way; and you will think I am a pretty sane lunatic; and you will respect me for having such sources of information; and if I can induce Mrs. Le—my friend to take it, I'll make a million for her in a month, and you will get the benefits accruing from having the market named after you—a Richards & Tuttle market, the papers will call it. Thank you very much for your kindness. I'll be down to-morrow before the opening. Good day, sir!”
And Mr. Robison left the office with a calm, confident look in his face. Richards gazed after him, a look of perplexity on his own face. Presently he shook his head. It meant that he gave up efforts to solve the puzzle, but that he would wait until commissions began.