“That’s why I’m buying. Listen to me now: You keep in touch with that reliable friend of yours and the moment the scaled selling stops, let me know. Instantly! Do you understand?”
“Yes,” said Joseph, and went away, not quite sure he could fathom Cammack’s motives in buying William Rockefeller’s stock. It was the knowledge that Cammack was bearish on the entire market that made his manœuvre so difficult to explain. However, Joseph saw his friend the transfer clerk and told him he wanted to be tipped off when the Old Man got through selling. Regularly twice a day Joseph called on his friend to inquire.
One day the transfer clerk told him, “There isn’t any more stock coming from the Old Man.” Joseph thanked him and ran to Cammack’s office with the information.
Cammack listened attentively, turned to Wheeler and asked, “Billy, how much St. Paul have we got in the office?” Wheeler looked it up and reported that they had accumulated about sixty thousand shares.
Cammack, being bearish, had been putting out short lines in the other Grangers as well as in various other stocks, even before he began to buy St. Paul. He was now heavily short of the market. He promptly ordered Wheeler to sell the sixty thousand shares of St. Paul that they were long of, and more besides. He used his long holdings of St. Paul as a lever to depress the general list and greatly benefit his operations for a decline.
St. Paul didn’t stop on that move until it reached forty-four and Cammack made a killing in it. He played his cards with consummate skill and profited accordingly. The point I would make is his habitual attitude toward trading. He didn’t have to reflect. He saw instantly what was far more important to him than his profit on that one stock. He saw that he had providentially been offered an opportunity to begin his big bear operations not only at the proper time but with a proper initial push. The St. Paul tip made him buy instead of sell because he saw at once that it gave him a vast supply of the best ammunition for his bear campaign.
To get back to myself. After I closed my trade in wheat and corn I went South in my yacht. I cruised about in Florida waters, having a grand old time. The fishing was great. Everything was lovely. I didn’t have a care in the world and I wasn’t looking for any.
One day I went ashore at Palm Beach. I met a lot of Wall Street friends and others. They were all talking about the most picturesque cotton speculator of the day. A report from New York had it that Percy Thomas had lost every cent. It wasn’t a commercial bankruptcy; merely the rumor of the world-famous operator’s second Waterloo in the cotton market.
I had always felt a great admiration for him. The first I ever heard of him was through the newspapers at the time of the failure of the Stock Exchange house of Sheldon & Thomas, when Thomas tried to corner cotton. Sheldon, who did not have the vision or the courage of his partner, got cold feet on the very verge of success. At least, so the Street said at the time. At all events, instead of making a killing they made one of the most sensational failures in years. I forget how many millions. The firm was wound up and Thomas went to work alone. He devoted himself exclusively to cotton and it was not long before he was on his feet again. He paid off his creditors in full with interest—debts he was not legally obliged to discharge—and withal had a million dollars left to himself. His comeback in the cotton market was in its way as remarkable as Deacon S. V. White’s famous stock-market exploit of paying off one million dollars in one year. Thomas’ pluck and brains made me admire him immensely.
Everybody in Palm Beach was talking about the collapse of Thomas’ deal in March cotton. You know how the talk goes—and grows; the amount of misinformation and exaggeration and improvements that you hear. Why, I’ve seen a rumor about myself grow so that the fellow who started it did not recognize it when it came back to him in less than twenty-four hours, swollen with new and picturesque details.