CHAPTER XXXI.
A VERY PERPLEXING SITUATION.
Wall Street was in a great flutter that day. A forgery, a defalcation that to-day would cause but a ripple on the surface, would have at that day sent the street into a tempest of excitement. A sheriff's deputy stood at the door of the office of the great Kidd Discovery Company, and a crowd of anxious and excited people, who had invested their money and now found they had lost it all, and had been made the victims of an aggravating fraud, surrounded the building. Threats and imprecations, enough to have sent a much more respectable house to the bottom of the sea, were heaped on the firm of Topman & Gusher. Nor indeed would it have been safe for any one connected with that enterprising firm to have shown his head in that assembly just at that time.
"Gentlemen will understand that this consolidated establishment is in a very unconsolidated condition. No further business will be done until its affairs are compromised;" the sheriff's deputy would announce, in a loud voice, as he endeavored to keep the crowd back. "There's only an empty safe, gentlemen, and some handsome office furniture," he would ejaculate. "You can't have them, you know."
Extravagance had indeed swallowed up all the substance and left only these insignificant things for the crowd of anxious creditors to feast their eyes on.
Rumor after rumor rang through Wall Street, each in turn increasing the amount of Topman's forgeries, and adding new names to the list of his victims. Bank ledgers were examined to see if the name of the firm appeared on them, and portly old directors put on their spectacles and congratulated themselves that the concern did not owe them a shilling. Groups of excited men stood at street corners discussing in animated tones the great event of the street. Everybody knew it must come. Nobody expected it would come so soon.
The strangest thing of all was that no one knew anything of the antecedents of either member of the firm, or what the great Kidd Discovery Company was really based upon. Enterprising gentlemen had bought and sold the stock, and made and lost money by it. That was all they knew of it. The morning papers had given them an interesting account about Gusher; now some one was needed to tell them all about Topman—where he came from, who he was, and where he was to be found. There was enough to call him rascal now. Even those who had ridden in his carriage, and enjoyed his dinners, and indeed thought him the best of fellows a few weeks before, were now ready to give him the hardest of kicks.
In truth, the firm was a mystery in Wall Street, and its largest creditors were in the greatest darkness concerning it. Some one has truly said that in a great commercial city men are known only by their enterprises and their successes; that their antecedents become lost in the magnitude and rapidity with which events revolve. This is particularly so with us. The firm of Topman & Gusher had fixed itself in Pearl Street, and gone quietly into business without friends, acquaintances, or endorsers; and in a single year had secured both credit and respectability. And it had done this on what is too frequently mistaken for energy and enterprise—show and pretension.
Upon Chapman's shoulders, however, the crushing effect of this great disaster fell heaviest. Stripped of all he had, ruined, disgraced, he stood like one amazed at the suddenness of his own fall. He had built his castles on sand, and now found them tumbling down, and crushing him under the ruin. His avaricious nature had led him, not only to wrong, but to bring distress and ruin on the unsuspecting and simple-minded Dutch settlers. The wheel of fortune was turned now. He had himself been ruined, betrayed, and disgraced by the very men he had put confidence in and made partners of his guilt. He also had set a snare and invented a plot by which he expected to strip honest old Hanz Toodleburg of his property, and now he had been caught in it himself.
His daughter, Mattie, had already disclosed to him the fact that she had overheard the conversation between him and Topman, relative to the manner of entrapping Hanz, and knew the secret of their plot. And she had appealed to him to save her the pain of bearing testimony that would conflict with his, to save an honest old man from poverty. The man of great progressive ideas now found it necessary to invent some way of escaping from what he saw would be worse than ruin and disgrace—a criminal's doom. His name had not appeared in the suit Topman & Gusher brought against Hanz Toodleburg. Oh, no. Chapman was needed as a witness to prove the signing of the papers, and all the circumstances relating to the sale of the secret of Kidd's treasure. Poverty and misfortune had now stepped in to purify and direct a smitten conscience.