The message was sent. The receiver rattled a hasty reply.
“He says you know all the particulars already. You must know 'em. Wants to know if this is Mr. Colton.”
“Tell him Mr. Colton is here, in the house. That will be true enough. And say we wish all particulars, figures and all. We want to know just where we stand.”
The demand for particulars was forwarded. There was more clicking.
“Give me a piece of paper and a pencil, quick,” urged Phineas. “This is a long feller.”
While he was writing the “long feller,” as the telegraph ticked it off, Miss Colton and the butler appeared, the latter bearing a loaded tray. He drew a little table up beside the operator and placed the tray upon it. Then he went away. The telegraph clicked and clicked and Cahoon wrote. Miss Colton and I watched him anxiously.
“Say,” observed Phineas, between intervals of clicks, “this feller's in some loony asylum, ain't he. This is pretty nigh as crazy as that message I fetched down. . . . Here 'tis. Maybe you folks know what it means, I don't. It's forty fathoms long, ain't it.”
It was long enough, surely. It was not all in the code jargon—Davis trusted the privacy of the wire sufficiently to send a portion of it in plain English—but he did not trust even that altogether. Miss Colton and I worked it out as we had the first telegram. As the translation progressed I could feel my hair tingling at the roots.
Was it to help in such a complication as this that I had been summoned? I, of all people! These waters were too deep for me.
Boiled down, the “particulars” for which Davis had been asked, and which he had sent, amounted to this: Colton, it seemed, had sold L. and T. “short” for a considerable period of time in order, as I had surmised, to force down the price and buy in at a reasonable figure. He had sold, in this way, about three-eighths of the common stock. Of this amount he had in his possession—in his broker's possession, that is—but two of the eighths. The “other crowd”—the Consolidated Pacific, presumably—had, as Davis now discovered, three-eighths actual certificates, in its pocket, had been acquiring them, on the quiet, while pretending to have lost interest. The public, unsuspecting powers in this, as in most of Wall Street little games, had still three-eighths. The “other crowd,” knowing “Big Jim's” position, had but to force immediate delivery of the missing one-eighth—the amount of Colton's over-selling—and he might be obliged to pay Heaven knew what for the shares. He MUST acquire them; he must buy them. And the price which he would be forced to pay might mean—perhaps not bankruptcy for him, the millionaire—but certainly the loss of a tremendous sum and all chance of acquiring control of the road. “This has been sprung on us all at once,” wired Davis. “They have got us cold. What shall I do? You must be here yourself before the market opens.”