“There’s no limit,” said the clerk. “You can buy all you please—if you’ve got the money.”
“Buy fifteen hundred shares,” I says, and took my roll from my pocket while the clerk starts to write the ticket.
Then I saw a red-headed man just shove that clerk away from the counter. He leaned across and said to me, “Say, Livingston, you go back to Dolan’s. We don’t want your business.”
“Wait until I get my ticket,” I said. “I just bought a little B.R.T.”
“You get no ticket here,” he said. By this time other clerks had got behind him and were looking at me. “Don’t ever come here to trade. We don’t take your business. Understand?”
There was no sense in getting mad or trying to argue, so I went back to the hotel, paid my bill and took the first train back to New York. It was tough. I wanted to take back some real money and that Teller wouldn’t let me make even one trade.
I got back to New York, paid Fullerton his five hundred, and started trading again with the St. Louis money. I had good and bad spells, but I was doing better than breaking even. After all, I didn’t have much to unlearn; only to grasp the one fact that there was more to the game of stock speculation than I had considered before I went to Fullerton’s office to trade. I was like one of those puzzle fans, doing the crossword puzzles in the Sunday supplement. He isn’t satisfied until he gets it. Well, I certainly wanted to find the solution to my puzzle. I thought I was done with trading in bucket shops. But I was mistaken.
About a couple of months after I got back to New York an old jigger came into Fullerton’s office. He knew A.R. Somebody said they’d once owned a string of race horses together. It was plain he’d seen better days. I was introduced to old McDevitt. He was telling the crowd about a bunch of Western race-track crooks who had just pulled off some skin game out in St. Louis. The head devil, he said, was a pool-room owner by the name of Teller.
“What Teller?” I asked him.
“Hi Teller; H. S. Teller.”