“If I could only buy some Cosmopolitan Traction!” he said. Then he walked forlornly northward, to the great Bridge, on his way to Brooklyn to eat with Griggs, the ruined grocery-man.
A PHILANTHROPIC WHISPER
There have been all manner of big stock operators and “leaders” in Wall Street—gentlemanly, well-educated leaders with a gift of epigram and foul-spoken leaders who knew as little of grammar as of manners; leaders to whom the stock market was only the Monte Carlo of the Tape and leaders to whom it was a means to an end; cool, calculating, steel-nerved leaders and fidgety, impulsive, excitable leaders; leaders who were church pillars and total abstainers and leaders whose only God was the ticker and whose most brilliant operations were carried on during the course of a drunken debauch. But never before, in the breathless history of Wall Street, had there been a leader whose following was numbered by the thousands and included not only the “shoe-string” speculators but the very richest of the rich! Never before a leader whose word took the place of statistical information, whose mere “I am buying it” created more purchasers for a stock than all the glowing prospectuses and all the accountants’ affidavits and all the bankers’ estimates.
At first Wall Street said the public was suffering from an epidemic of speculative insanity; that Colonel Treadwell was merely a bold operator “backed” by a clique of the greatest fortunes in America; that he was not a skilful “manipulator” of values, but by sheer brute force of tremendous buying he made those stocks advance with which he was identified and that, of course, the public always follows the stocks that are made active; and many other explanations. But in the end Wall Street came to realize exactly to what it was that the blind devotion of the speculative public for the colonel was due. Defying all traditions, upsetting all precedents, violating all rules, driving all the “veterans” to the verge of hysterics and bankruptcy by his daily defiance of accepted views as to the art of operating in stocks, Colonel Josiah T. Treadwell founded a new school: He told the truth.
The colonel sat in his office alone with his thoughts. The door was open—it was always open—and the clerks and customers of Treadwell & Co. as they passed to and fro caught glimpses of the great leader’s broad, kindly face and shrewd, little, twinkling eyes that seemed to smile at them. They wondered what new “deal” the colonel was planning. And then they wished with all their souls and purses they knew the name of the stock—merely the name of it—so that they might “get in on the ground floor.”
The famous operator sat on a revolving chair by his desk. He had turned his back on an accumulation of correspondence and he now rotated from right to left and from left to right. The tips of his shoes—he was a short man—missed the floor by an inch or two and he swung his feet contentedly. A ticker whirred away blithely and from time to time Treadwell ceased his rocking and his foot-swinging, and glanced jovially at the ticker “tape.” From his window he could see a Mississippi of people or a bit of New York summer sky, but his restless eyes were roaming and skipping from place to place. And the clerks and the customers wondered whether the market was going the way the colonel had planned. The ticker was whirring and clicking, impassively, and the colonel wore a meditative look. What was the “old man” scheming? The bears had better be on their guard! As a matter of fact, Josiah T. Treadwell was thinking that his brother Wilson, who had left him a few minutes before, was certainly growing bald. He also wondered whether people who advertised “restorers” and “invigorators” were veracious or merely “Wall Streety” as he put it to himself.
A young man, an utter stranger to Colonel Treadwell, halted at the door, and looked at the leader of the stock market, hesitatingly.
“Come in, come in,” called out the colonel, cheerily. “Won’t you walk into my parlor?”
“Good-morning, Colonel Treadwell,” said the lad, diffidently.
“Who are you, and what are you, and what can I do for you?” said the colonel, extending his hand.