“Extra! Extra! All about the big Wall Street crash! Hervey fortune entirely swept away!”
Bentley sent an office boy out for the paper and spread it out on the desk to digest it as quickly as possible.
“One million shares of Hervey Incorporated,” read the black words in a box on the first page––a story in mourning, “were dumped on the market at eleven o’clock this morning. Four men seem to have been behind the queer coup. One of them had a power of attorney from Harold Hervey himself, and he had the shares to sell. So many shares were dumped that the bottom fell out of the stock. Others holding the Hervey shares, fearful that they would get nothing at all, also began to dump, and every share thus dumped was bought up quickly by three other men about whom nobody knew anything, except that they paid with cash. The strangest thing about it all was that the three men who bought Hervey Incorporated, seemed to be dumb-mutes, for they didn’t say anything. They acted through a broker, and indicated their purchases with their fingers in the conventional manner and tendered cards as identification! They were Harry Stanley, Clarence Morton, and Willard Cleve––addresses unknown, history unknown.
“Nothing, in fact, is known about any of the three or the little white-haired, apple-cheeked man who sold so heavily in Hervey Incorporated. That the three mutes did not buy the shares sold by the little white-haired man would seem to indicate that all four of them worked together ... but it is only a supposition as they were not seen together and apparently did not know one another. But the three mutes constantly ate walnuts. All four men, who among them knocked the bottom out of Wall Street, and wiped away the Hervey fortune, slipped out in the excitement inspired by their rapid buying and selling, and seemed to vanish into thin air.”
Bentley didn’t know much about the stock market, but it seemed to him that Barter had managed a theft of mighty proportions. With a power of attorney, which he had wrung from Hervey after his capture, he had managed to possess himself of Hervey’s shares. In themselves they were worth millions. Even at a fraction of their price Barter would realize heavily on them. Selling quickly he would force the price far down. Then his puppets––and Bentley had no doubt that Stanley, Morton and Cleve were his puppets––bought all other shares offered by panicky investors in Hervey Incorporated at a tiny fraction of their value. Far less, naturally, than Barter had made by selling his loot.
The purchased shares Barter could hold for an increase. Hervey Incorporated was good and its price would go up again, and Barter would sell and gain millions.
That is how Bentley saw it, and his lips drew into a firmer, straighter line as, half an hour later, he explained it all to Ellen.
“It’s desperate, dear,” he whispered in her ear. “Manhattan’s financial structure has been shaken to its foundations. But that isn’t all by any means. Barter has performed his horrible operation on two of New York’s most brilliant men. It was a Barter gesture to send ‘Harold Hervey’ to capture Balisle, and the horror of it staggered me.”