CHAPTER XX
TWO GENTLEMEN BECOME ACQUAINTED
In a town like Mariona the tradition of riches is almost as good as the proved fact. It had been said for years that Ezra Dameron was the possessor of great wealth. How, indeed, could he be otherwise, when he was a miser and never spent any money? Old Roger Merriam had died one of the richest men in the state, and in dividing his property he had favored his daughters, so that Mrs. Forrest and Mrs. Dameron had received larger shares than their brothers. Copeland, the lawyer who never practised, possessed a great fund of useful information, and he estimated the value of Margaret Dameron’s estate at four hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and Copeland was a conservative man. Ezra Dameron’s personal estate was popularly supposed to be equally large, but this was something that no one knew anything about.
Ezra Dameron had been called a hard man. There was an uncharitable smile that went usually with the mention of his name. The friends of the Merriams said that he was an ugly blackguard; but there were people who did not admire the Merriams, and these were inclined to the belief that his wife’s family had misjudged and mistreated him. His way of living was not attractive to sane, reasonable people, but if he chose to shut himself off from the usual currents of human enjoyment he was the loser and it was his affair.
Ezra Dameron had long been content to lend money on mortgages, to buy and sell real estate and to invest in tax titles; but he had in recent years widened his field, through curious circumstances. He had held in his strong-box for a decade several hundred shares of stock in a western railway company that had never paid any dividends. The property had been absorbed by a great system with the result that the market value of the stock doubled instantly. As a result Dameron’s attitude toward the world of finance centered in Wall Street altered considerably. He became a close student of the stock list as printed in the daily newspapers. He procured copies of the annual financial statements of a number of railways and pored over them in his office. The tendency of prices was upward; political conditions, which he had always studied carefully, seemed favorable to a long-continued period of good times. He kept the stock he had, but bought more, chiefly among low-priced securities, buying outright through his bank. The stock in every case was bought in his own name as trustee; and he deposited it in his strong-box and watched the value of his holdings rise steadily.
He began to feel himself in touch with large matters. His ownership of this stock added fresh zest to life, and he experienced a thrill of pleasure as he contemplated his investments. He entered his transactions with scrupulous care in his account books; and his time, which had previously been given wholly to the care of real estate and mortgages, he began to divide, giving a large share of it to the study of the markets. He found that he could learn the daily stock quotations in advance of their publication in the afternoon newspapers by visiting the offices of a broker, who provided a large room with comfortable seats for his patrons and chalked the quotations on a bulletin board. He was free to visit the place when he liked; no one appeared to know him and no questions were asked. He continued this course for a year with growing interest. His life had been singularly free from excitement; but here was a game that he could watch as a calm spectator and with no danger to himself. Then the newspapers began to be filled with stories of the great fortunes that were made daily in Wall Street. The railroads had never before been so prosperous; there was a wail all over the land because there were not cars enough to handle the country’s business.
It was a great game, and Ezra Dameron watched the blackboard with increasing fascination, enjoying the gossip of the broker’s office, where the other habitués learned to know him, and confided to him their successes. They were poor men who had not money with which to purchase stock outright, yet they, too, found it possible to take advantage of the general prosperity. The idea pleased Dameron; he construed it as an evidence of the Providence of God, who was dispensing riches to all the faithful. He gradually reasoned himself into the belief that it was foolish to purchase and pay for stocks in full when a mere memorandum of ownership, based on the identical property and the same market, would greatly multiply his increase. He knew from his own observations in the broker’s office that it was an easy matter to make purchases on margins; he had witnessed thousands of such transactions at the cashier’s window. Nothing could be simpler; in no way could a dollar be invested to so good advantage.
He came slowly to the conclusion that it was absurd to buy shares outright when it was possible to gain all the advantage of a rising market by carrying a multiplied number of shares on margin. He argued himself into this belief gradually. He experienced the common misfortune of the beginner at games of chance; he was extremely successful. This he believed to be the result of his sagacity and shrewdness in studying the internal character of his investments, refusing to believe that he was profiting merely by a general upward tendency perceptible in every branch of trade.
At first he put aside only a small amount of money for use in speculation, but he increased this gradually,—almost unconsciously. He grew afraid to be seen so much in the broker’s offices; he could no longer throw an air of inadvertence about his visits there, for he found himself spending whole days before the bulletin board. A number of his houses were placarded for rent, but the gambler’s passion had entered into his blood. He had traveled little, but now the magnitude of the country’s transportation interests struck him in a new light; he studied the maps of railways and pictured in his dreams the thousands of manufactories and the plains of corn and wheat in the West that were back of every share of stock in the great systems.
But it was best that no one should know at home that he was investing his money in these ways, and he next opened an account with a large brokerage firm in Chicago, and subscribed to a Chicago daily newspaper that he might the better keep in touch with the market. His cunning in hiding his steps on the perilous sands of speculation kept pace with the growth of his passion for the game. He made deposits with the brokers in cash drawn from the Mariona National Bank and sent by express to Chicago. He even alternated his use of the express companies.
When Jack Balcomb went to see Dameron about the plot of ground known as the creek strip, the old man was poring over a crop bulletin. His callers either came to collect or to confess their inability to pay, and as Dameron had never seen Balcomb before, he concluded at once that the young man was a collector. People who came to pay him were not usually so well appareled.