“Yer ain't bad stuff,” said the boy with a grin. I tore open the envelope and read on the sheet that came from it:
“Sell everything you bought—never mind the price. Other orders off. D. K.”
I gasped with amazement. Had Doddridge Knapp gone mad? To sell twelve thousand five hundred shares of Omega was sure to smash the market, and the half-million dollars that had been put into them would probably shrink by two hundred thousand or more if the order was carried out.
I read the note again.
Then a suspicion large enough to overshadow the universe grew up in my brain. I recalled that Doddridge Knapp had given me a cipher with which he would communicate with me, and I believed, moreover, that he had no idea where I might be at the present moment.
“It's all right, sonny,” I said. “Trot along.”
“Where's yer letter?” asked the boy, loyally anxious to earn his quarter.
“It won't have to go now,” I said coolly. I believed that the boy meant no harm to me, but I was not taking any risks.
The boy sauntered down the hall, singing My Name Is Hildebrandt Montrose, and I was left gazing at the letter with a melancholy smile.
“Well, I must look like a sucker if they think I can be taken in by a trick like that,” was my mental comment. I charged the scheme up to my snake-eyed friend and had a poorer opinion of his intelligence than I had hitherto entertained. Yet I was astonished that he should, even with the most hearty wish to bring about my downfall, contrive a plan that would inflict a heavy loss on his employer and possibly ruin him altogether. There was more beneath than I could fathom. My brain refused to work in the maze of contradictions and mysteries, plots and counterplots, in which I was involved.