Lou Dillon was a Sullivan stock that had been promoted at 25; 48 was now a point under the market, however.
"We'll take 'em," I said. "What's the matter?"
"Rumored up here that your books are under inspection by the Post-office Department. You have had five new men on your books for the past few weeks, and some one has spread a story here that Nixon has sicked the Government on to you."
I denied it, of course. The five men in question were the experts who had been sent up from San Francisco by the firm of accountants recommended to us by the American National Bank, and they were there at our own behest. The story was a raw canard.
Throughout the day the Sullivan Trust Company was called upon to stand behind the San Francisco market and take in nearly all of the big blocks of Sullivan stocks owned in the camps of Tonopah and Manhattan. Before our denials could reach the sellers the damage had been done. And it took $250,000 a day for four days to hold the market against this fresh onslaught.
Color had been lent to the wild rumors about a Postal investigation by the fact that an attack had been made on me in the columns of the Denver Mining Record a year before. Rumor said the dose was going to be repeated. In the early days of the camp, when I was at the head of the Goldfield-Tonopah Advertising Agency, I had represented the Denver Mining Record in Goldfield. As its agent I had secured advertising contracts for it which netted my agency in the neighborhood of $10,000 a year in commissions. The owners of the newspaper conceived the idea that I was making too much money on a commission basis and sent Wing B. Allen, formerly of Salt Lake, to the scene to take my place. Mr. Allen worked for smaller pay. He wanted me to divide my commission on standing business, and I refused. The publishers took Mr. Allen's part. As a result I withdrew all the advertising from the columns of the Denver Mining Record for which my agency had been responsible, and the Denver Mining Record was never able to regain the lost ground.
A short time before the raid on our stocks began Mr. Allen had been arrested in Goldfield on a warrant sworn out by L. M. Sullivan, tried before Judge Bell on the charge of extortion and bound over to the Grand Jury. At the hearing before Judge Bell the Sullivan Trust Company submitted evidence that Mr. Allen had threatened, if we did not give his paper a slice of the promotion advertising of the Sullivan Trust Company, that the Denver Mining Record would commence to attack me personally in its columns, and, because of my early Past, would do the trust company serious damage.
At the hearing despatches were submitted which were filed at the Goldfield office of the Western Union Telegraph Company by Mr. Allen, in which he had informed his paper that it had better proceed with the attack, because neither Mr. Sullivan nor myself gave indication of yielding. At the hearing, under oath and in a crowded courtroom, I openly denounced Mr. Allen and his newspaper as blackmailers of the very vilest type, and so did Mr. Sullivan. Judge Bell, on the submission by the Western Union of Mr. Allen's despatches to his paper, promptly held him for the Grand Jury.
On the advice of former Governor Thomas, of Colorado, to whom the Sullivan Trust Company paid a retainer as counsel, and who later became chief counsel for the Goldfield Consolidated, I employed Christopher C. Clay of Denver to commence suit against the owners of the Denver Mining Record. As a result I secured from them a settlement by which they agreed not to mention my name again in their paper. I was harassed at the time, or I would not have compromised. The stuff printed by the Denver Mining Record, which has been rehashed by every blackmailer who ever attempted to levy on me, was about two-tenths true and eight-tenths false. It was a literal copy of an anonymous publication put out by a set of blackmailers who had tried to circulate it years before in New York when I was head of the Maxim & Gay Company. I had spent thousands of dollars to run down the authorship then, but without avail. The lawyers had succeeded in seizing thousands of copies of the publication, and had made an arrest, but they failed to prove authorship of the screed and ownership of the paper, and the culprits therefore were not punished. In Denver when Mr. Clay applied for criminal warrants, he was asked first to furnish proof of authorship, which was impossible for us, the articles having been unsigned.