With his wide acquaintance and friendly relations with the bankers and brokers, both in New York and Boston, it was an easy matter for Nick to ascertain, without disclosing his motives, the facts which he aimed to discover.
He learned from perfectly reliable sources that Badger, who had no partner in business, was heavily long of stocks in the market, a market that had been steadily declining for months; also, that his loan-account on this class of collateral had been repeatedly subjected to calls for additional margins, which were known to have been met only with considerable difficulty and delay.
In a nutshell, Nick easily discovered that Badger had for months been in financial hot water, yet had succeeded in tiding himself along up to date.
Nick now thought he could guess by what desperate means this man was raising the funds required to meet his increasing obligations from day to day.
Incidentally, however, Nick learned other facts for which he was not specially seeking, yet which further confirmed the theory he had so shrewdly formed.
These facts related to Badger’s wife and her sister, the Tremont Street fortune-teller, and were imparted to Nick a bit maliciously by a broker who had suffered in one way or another through Madame Victoria, and who was informed of the history of the two women.
Briefly stated, as it was given to Nick, both were born in England, the daughters of a second-rate actor and manager of various itinerant amusement enterprises, in none of which he had achieved any great success.
The two girls had some little talent in one way or another, however, and both had spent their earlier years in the show business, filling such positions as the various enterprises of their father, since dead, required.
Now as an alleged gipsy fortune-teller, now as a palmist, at other times an astrologer, or some like attraction under a different name, but always as a sideshow to some other amusement, the younger of the two had acquired that experience which, after the marriage of her sister and her coming to America, had enabled her to establish in Boston the business now conducted under the name of Madame Victoria.