I didn’t have much hope, but, of course, I tried to get into the bucket shops again. There were fewer of them and some of them were run by strangers. Those who remembered me wouldn’t give me a chance to show them whether I had gone back as a trader or not. I told them the truth, that I had lost in New York whatever I had made at home; that I didn’t know as much as I used to think I did; and that there was no reason why it should not now be good business for them to let me trade with them. But they wouldn’t. And the new places were unreliable. Their owners thought twenty shares was as much as a gentleman ought to buy if he had any reason to suspect he was going to guess right.
I needed the money and the bigger shops were taking in plenty of it from their regular customers. I got a friend of mine to go into a certain office and trade. I just sauntered in to look them over. I again tried to coax the order clerk to accept a small order, even if it was only fifty shares. Of course he said no. I had rigged up a code with this friend so that he would buy or sell when and what I told him. But that only made me chicken feed. Then the office began to grumble about taking my friend’s orders. Finally one day he tried to sell a hundred St. Paul and they shut down on him.
We learned afterward that one of the customers saw us talking together outside and went in and told the office, and when my friend went up to the order clerk to sell that hundred St. Paul the guy said:
“We’re not taking any selling orders in St. Paul, not from you.”
“Why, what’s the matter, Joe?” asked my friend.
“Nothing doing, that’s all,” answered Joe.
“Isn’t that money any good? Look it over. It’s all there.” And my friend passed over the hundred—my hundred—in tens. He tried to look indignant and I was looking unconcerned; but most of the other customers were getting close to the combatants, as they always did when there was loud talking or the slightest semblance of a scrap between the shop and any customer. They wanted to get a line on the merits of the case in order to get a line on the solvency of the concern.
The clerk, Joe, who was a sort of assistant manager, came out from behind his cage, walked up to my friend, looked at him and then looked at me.
“It’s funny,” he said slowly—“it’s damned funny that you never do a single thing here when your friend Livingston isn’t around. You just sit and look at the board by the hour. Never a peep. But after he comes in you get busy all of a sudden. Maybe you are acting for yourself; but not in this office any more. We don’t fall for Livingston tipping you off.”
Well, that stopped my board money. But I had made a few hundred more than I had spent and I wondered how I could use them, for the need of making enough money to go back to New York with was more urgent than ever. I felt that I would do better the next time. I had had time to think calmly of some of my foolish plays; and then, one can see the whole better when one sees it from a little distance. The immediate problem was to make the new stake.