“Nobody has,” said John.
“Then we’re all crazy,” said the broker. “More than a million dollars’ worth of the stuff has just been delivered to us. We’ve got to pay for it at once.”
“Let’s look at it,” said John. “I want to see it.”
He saw it. The shares that had been delivered to him were Creed’s.
John paid for them, though it almost broke his back. He used his own money until he had no more and borrowed the rest from Slaymaker and Pick on his notes. The fiasco was complete. American Steel was indignantly stricken from the Stock Exchange list because it had been manipulated in so outrageous a manner and the newspapers wrote about it most scornfully.
It was all over and John and his crowd, now always excepting Creed, were at dinner in the Holland House, when a reporter from The Sun appeared at their table unannounced and asked: “Mr. Breakspeare, how do you feel?”
John went on eating as he replied: “I feel like a dog that’s been kicked so much he goes sideways. I’ve got every pain there is but one. That’s belly ache.”
This was printed the next morning on the front page of The Sun, and Wall Street forgot itself long enough to say: “Not a bad sport, anyhow.”
“Now I suppose we’ll go back and attend to the steel business,” said Slaymaker.
“In a day or two,” John answered. “There’s something I want to do here yet.”