Personally I considered the message a snare. Somebody in the East, I guessed, had bitten off a block of Seyler-Humphrey at around 25 cents when it was promoted a few weeks prior and had made up his mind that he would turn a trick. The Goldfield brokers having received telegrams, I assumed that the same message had been sent to brokers in San Francisco, where the stock was also listed. It seemed to me that an advance would certainly be recorded on the following day. Sure enough, the next morning the stock advanced to 38 cents a share, and the market boiled. At this figure, and a little higher, I unloaded in the neighborhood of 100,000 shares in Goldfield and San Francisco. A good deal of this stock had been picked up by me the night before. But I recall that one block of 10,000 shares had been allotted to me weeks before at the brokers' price of 20 cents, and another block of 10,000 shares had been given me as a bonus for my publicity measures.
After turning over to the treasury of the Jumping Jack Manhattan Mining Company the amount netted from the sale of treasury stock, and paying off the amount still due on the original purchase price, Sullivan and I, within three weeks of my little dare, had cleaned up a net profit of $250,000.
"Do you want a cut?" I asked Sullivan when our joint profits reached the quarter-million mark.
"No, I'm game. Stay with it," he returned.
Next day the L. M. Sullivan Trust Company, destined to make and lose millions in the great Goldfield boom that followed and to mold for me an exciting career as a promoter, was formed with a paid-up capital of $250,000. Sullivan was made president and I vice-president and general manager.
[1] On the death of Mr. Nixon in Washington, D.C., in June, 1912, Mr. Wingfield was appointed his Successor as U.S. Senator by Governor Oddie. Mr. Wingfield's Goldfield newspaper felicitated its owner and pronounced the appointment to be logical and deserved. Mr. Wingfield, however, after hearing from Washington as to the manner in which the news of his appointment was received by members of the Senate, notified Governor Oddie three weeks later that he must decline the honor. He gave other reasons.
CHAPTER III
The Brewing of a Saturnalia of Speculation
Mr. Sullivan's gambling-house affiliation was not considered a drawback to the trust company. George Wingfield, vice-president and heaviest stockholder of the leading bank in Goldfield, was a gambler and Mr. Wingfield also owned extensive interests in the mines. His mines were making good, too. Owners of the gambling places now stood as much for financial solidity in Goldfield as did savings-bank directors in the East.
As for myself, I was unafraid. I vowed I would henceforth prove an exception to the mining-camp rule and quit all forms of gambling. My new position demanded this. And I found it easy to obey the self-imposed inhibition. Soon the stock-market operations of the trust company gave my speculative instinct all the vent it could possibly have craved under any circumstances.