“If somebody else is snapping it up, do I understand that I'm not to bid over them?”
“You're not to understand anything of the kind,” he said, with a little disgust in his tone. “You're to get the stock. You've bought and sold enough to know how to do that. But don't start a boom for the price. Let her go down. Sabe?”
I felt that there was deep water ahead.
“Perfectly,” I said. “I think I see the whole thing.”
The King of the Street looked at me with a grim smile.
“Maybe you do, but all the same you'd better keep your money out of this little deal unless you can spare it as well as not. Well, get back to your room. You've got your check-book all right?”
Alone once more I was in despair of unraveling the tangle in which I was involved. I felt convinced that Doddridge Knapp was the mover in the plots that sought my life. He had, I felt sure, believed me dead, and was startled into fear at my unheralded appearance. Yet why should he trust me with his business? I could not doubt that the buying and selling he had given to my care were important. I knew nothing about the price of stocks but I was sure that the orders he had given me involved many thousands of dollars. Yet it might be—the thought struck home to me—that the credit had not been provided for me, and my checks on the Nevada Bank would serve only to land me in jail.
The disturbed condition of the books attracted my attention once more. The volumes were scattered over the desk and thrown about the room as though somebody had been seeking for a mislaid document. I looked curiously over them as I replaced them on the shelves. They were law-books, California Reports, and the ordinary text-books and form-books of the attorney. All bore on the fly-leaf the name of Horace H. Plymire, but no paper or other indication of ownership could I find.
I wondered idly who this Plymire might be, and pictured to myself some old attorney who had fallen into the hands of Doddridge Knapp, and had, through misfortune, been forced to sell everything for the mess of pottage to keep life in him. But there was small time for musing, and I went out to do Doddridge Knapp's bidding in the stock-gambling whirlpool of Pine Street.
There was already a confused murmur of voices about the rival exchanges that were the battlegrounds of millionaires. The “curbstone boards” were in session. The buyers who traded face to face, and the brokers who carried their offices under their hats, were noisily bargaining, raising as much clamor over buying and selling a few shares as the most important dealer in the big boards could raise over the transfer of as many thousands.