"An answer from the syndicate within a week! My dear Fitz, I see yo' drift. You have kept the Garden Spots for the foreign investors. That man is impressed, suh; I saw it in his eye."
The room began filling up with the various customers and loungers common to such offices: the debonair gentleman in check trousers and silk hat, with a rose in his button-hole, who dusts his trousers broadside with his cane—short of one hundred shares with thirty per cent. margin; the shabby old man with a solemn face who watches the ticker a moment and then wanders aimlessly out, looking more like an underpaid clerk in a law office than the president of a crosstown railroad—long of one thousand shares with no margin at all; the nervous man who stops the messenger boys and devours the sales' lists before they can be skewered on the files,—not a dollar's interest either way; and, last of all, the brokers with little pads and nimble pencils.
[Illustration]
The news that the great English syndicate was looking into the C. & W. A. L R. R. was soon around the office, and each habitue had a bright word for the colonel, congratulating him on the favorable turn his affairs had taken.
All but old Klutchem, a broker in unlisted securities, who had been trying for weeks to get a Denver land scheme before the same syndicate, and had failed.
"Garden Spot bonds! Bosh! Road begins nowhere and ends nowhere. If any set of fools built it, the only freight it would get, outside of peanuts and sweet potatoes, would be razor-back hogs and niggers. I wouldn't give a yellow dog for enough of those securities to paper a church."
The colonel was on his feet in an instant. "Mr. Klutchem, I cannot permit you, suh, to use such language in my presence unrebuked; you"—
"Now, see here, old Garden Spot, you know"—
The familiarity angered the colonel even more than the outburst.
"Caarter, suh,—George Fairfax Caarter," said the colonel with dignity.