“‘Will you walk into my parlor said the spider to the fly,’” murmured Jim under his breath, too low for Reggie to hear.
“So I went into the bally place one day,” went on Reggie. “Swell offices, too, if you ask me. My word! Mahogany desks, Persian rugs, all the fixin’s. Treated me like a prince, dontcherknow. Advised me to put a hundred on a stock that he said was sure to go up, and, by Jove, it did! I cleared quite a bit of money.
“Then he said it was a pity I wasn’t livin’ in the city so that I could watch the ticker and take advantage of opportunities. That was the only way, he said. Watch the tape and jump in instanter, get in on the rise. Since I couldn’t be here, though, he said that, if I liked, he would attend to that for me, look after my money as if it were his own, and send me daily statements of the way things were going. It was to be a sort of discretionary account, I think he called it. I was to trust his judgment and he’d do the best he could for me.”
“What he meant was that he’d do you the best he could,” commented Joe. “Well, did he send you the statements? And what did they show?”
“I got the statements all right,” said Reggie. “But they mostly showed a loss. Once in a while I’d make a little, but nine times out of ten I had a loss. He kept callin’ for more margins, and each time he did it I had to borrow a little more money from him on the stocks he was holding as collateral to supply the margins. And now, by his showing, the money he has advanced to cover the losses has just about eaten up the value of the stocks.”
“In other words, he has your ten thousand dollars’ worth of stocks, you have some phony statements showing pretended losses, and you’re left holding the bag,” summed up Joe. “It looks to me like the old bucket shop game. Ten to one he’s never bought a single one of the stocks he told you he was buying on your account. It’s just been a matter of juggling his books. At the end of each day he’s simply picked out a stock that has registered a loss, put that stock down in your statement as one he had purchased on your account, and pocketed just that much more of your money. Once in a while he let you win just to keep you on the hook. You haven’t even had a run for your money.”
“Probably that’s the game, but it may be a mighty hard thing to prove it,” remarked Jim. “It’s likely that he’s covered his tracks pretty well.”
“Not so well that we may not be able to find them!” exclaimed Joe, jumping to his feet. “Reggie, we’ll go down and have a showdown with Harrish the first thing to-morrow morning.”
“Beard the lion in his den?” asked Jim.
“No,” said Joe grimly. “Trail the skunk to his hole!”