"Wait; I'll go along with you," Aaron cried.
"Don't you trouble yourself," Uncle Mosha declared with a confidential wink at Leon Sammet and Henry D. Feldman; "I could take care of myself all right."
"What are you going to do with all that money, Mr. Kronberg?" Leon asked as Uncle Mosha turned to leave. The old man paused with his hand on the door, and once more he favoured his questioner with a significant wink.
"Leave that to me," he said.
The thirty days succeeding Morris Perlmutter's visit to Madison Street were busy ones for all the Kronbergs. Alex had accompanied Max Gershon to Bridgetown, where conditions more than fulfilled Abe's glowing account, and the formation of the Kronberg-Gershon Drygoods Company proceeded without delay. As for Aaron Kronberg, he found that the borrowing of eight thousand dollars, even for so short a period as would be necessary to consummate the Madison Street deal, was no easy task. At length he raised the sum by paying a large bonus to his bankers in Port Sullivan, and it was deposited to the credit of Sammet Brothers four days before the closing of title.
Meantime Uncle Mosha had not neglected the opportunity afforded him during his last few days of liberty. With his seven hundred and fifty dollars he had sought the brokerage offices of Klinkberg & Company the morning after signing his contract with Leon Sammet. There he selected American Chocolate and Cocoa as the medium of his speculation and promptly went short of seven hundred on a one-point margin. The same afternoon he was within a sixteenth of being wiped out when the market turned, and nearly one month later he took his profit of twenty-one hundred dollars, which with the original investment, minus the brokerage amounted to twenty-eight hundred dollars.
"Never no more," he said to the brokerage firm's cashier as he drew his profit. "I am through oncet and for all. No one could get me to touch another share of stock so long as I live."
With this solemn declaration he passed out of Klinkberg & Company's office just as a short stout man burst into the hall from a door marked "Customers."
"Wow!" the short stout man exclaimed.
"Warum wow?" Uncle Mosha asked.