“The stock seems pretty high at 180.”
“You won’t think so when it sells at 250. Gilmartin, I don’t hear this; I don’t think it; I know it!”
“All right; I’m in,” quoth Gilmartin, jovially. He felt a sense of emancipation now that he had made up his mind to resume his speculating. He took every cent of the nine hundred dollars he had made from telling people the same things that Freeman told him now, and bought a hundred Gotham Gas at $185 a share. Also he telegraphed to all his clients to plunge in the stock.
It fluctuated between 184 and 186 for a fortnight. Freeman daily asseverated that “they” were accumulating the stock. But, one fine day, the directors met, agreed that business was bad, and having sold out most of their own holdings, decided to reduce the dividend rate from 8 to 6 per cent. Gotham Gas broke seventeen points in ten short minutes. Gilmartin lost all he had. He found it impossible to pay for his advertisements. The telegraph companies refused to accept any more “collect” messages. This deprived Gilmartin of his income as a tipster. Griggs had kept on speculating and had lost all his money and his wife’s in a little deal in Iowa Midland. All that Gilmartin could hope to get from him was an occasional invitation to dinner. Mrs. Gilmartin, after they were dispossessed for non-payment of rent, left her husband, and went to live with a sister in Newark who did not like Gilmartin.
His clothes became shabby and his meals irregular. But always in his heart, as abiding as an inventor’s faith in himself, there dwelt the hope that some day, somehow, he would “strike it rich” in the stock market.
One day he borrowed five dollars from a man who had made five thousand in Cosmopolitan Traction. The stock, the man said, had only begun to go up, and Gilmartin believed it and bought five shares in “Percy’s,” his favorite bucket shop. The stock began to rise slowly but steadily. The next afternoon “Percy’s” was raided, the proprietor having disagreed with the police as to price.
Gilmartin lingered about New Street, talking with other customers of the raided bucket shop, discussing whether or not it was a “put up job” of old Percy himself, who, it was known, had been losing money to the crowd for weeks past. One by one the victims went away and at length Gilmartin left the ticker district. He walked slowly down Wall Street, then turned up William Street, thinking of his luck. Cosmopolitan Traction had certainly looked like higher prices. Indeed, it seemed to him that he could almost hear the stock shouting, articulately: “I’m going up, right away, right away!” If somebody would buy a thousand shares and agree to give him the profits on a hundred, on ten, on one!
But he had not even his carfare. Then he remembered that he had not eaten since breakfast. It did him no good to remember it now. He would have to get his dinner from Griggs in Brooklyn.
“Why,” Gilmartin told himself with a burst of curious self-contempt, “I can’t even buy a cup of coffee!”
He raised his head and looked about him to find how insignificant a restaurant it was in which he could not buy even a cup of coffee. He had reached Maiden Lane. As his glance ran up and down the north side of that street, it was arrested by the sign: