"I guess that will hold us!" he moaned.
"Hold us?" I answered. "Nothing better ever happened. It'll make us!"
"You poor nut!" he exclaimed. "Lose $130,000 in a day and it will make you! Stop your noise!"
"Listen!" I rejoined. "At an expense of $3,000 for tolls I have telegraphed a full-page ad to fifty leading city newspapers, telling the public that we tipped this horse to-day at 10 to 1 and that we mailed checks to our customers to-night for $130,000. The gain we will reap in prestige and fresh business will repay our loss on the horse."
The next day the Western Union Telegraph Company found it necessary to assign three cashiers to the work of issuing checks to the Maxim & Gay Company for money telegraphed by new customers. Some individual remittances were as high as $2,000. The money telegraphed us amounted to about $150,000, and within ten days eighty per cent. of our own dividend checks were returned to us by our customers, indorsed back to us with instructions to double their bets, and within two weeks we were able to figure that in the neighborhood of $375,000 was sent us as a result.
A DISASTROUS NEWSPAPER WINDUP
During the progress of the New Orleans meeting, I purchased a controlling interest in the New York Daily America—a newspaper patterned after the Morning Telegraph—from a group of members of the Metropolitan Turf Association, who had sunk about $75,000 in the enterprise. The Morning Telegraph was in the hands of a receiver. I calculated that, by transferring the Maxim & Gay advertisements from the Morning Telegraph to the Daily America, I could make the Daily America pay and force the Morning Telegraph out of the field. Later, the late William C. Whitney, who was a shining light on the turf as well as in finance, was induced to purchase the Morning Telegraph. Then trouble began to brew for me.
One morning I was summoned to the offices of August Belmont on Nassau Street.
"For the good of the turf, you must omit your Maxim & Gay advertisements from the Daily America and other newspapers hereafter," declared Mr. Belmont on my entering his room.
"Why?" asked I.