“You didn't expect me to be buying up the market, did you?” The yellow-gray mustache went up, and the wolf-fangs gleamed from beneath.
“I reckon it wouldn't have been a very profitable speculation,” he replied.
Then he leaned back in his chair and looked meditatively at the wall.
“It was for one fellow, though,” he continued, mellowing as he mused in his recollections. “It was at the time of the Honest Injun deal—I guess you don't remember that. It must have been ten years ago. Well, I had a fellow named—why, what was his name?—oh, Riggs, or Rix, I forget which,—and he was handling about a hundred thousand dollars for me. We had Honest Injun run up from one dollar till it was over twenty dollars a share. I had to go up to Nevada City, and left ten thousand shares with him with orders to sell at twenty-five.”
“Yes,” I said, as the King of the Street paused and seemed inclined to drop the story. “At twenty-five.”
“Well,” he continued at this encouragement, “when I came back, Honest Injun was down to ten cents, or somewhere around there, which was just about as I expected. Riggs comes up to me as proud as a spotted pup, and tells me that he'd sold at thirty dollars, and cleared fifty thousand more than I'd expected.”
“A pretty good deal,” I suggested.
“It happened that way, but it wouldn't happen so once in ten years. The stock had gone up to thirty-one or thirty-two before it broke, and he had sold just in time.”
“Did he get a reward?” I asked, as my employer appeared to wait for an observation from me.
“He did,” said the Wolf with a growl. “I discharged him on the spot. And hanged if I didn't tell him that the fifty thousand was his—and let him have it, too. Oh, he was playing in great luck! That combination wouldn't come twice in a thousand years. The next man who tried it went to jail,” he added with a snap of the jaws.