"Well, write it off against your profits and charge it up to experience," said Drake, smiling. "Store this away for the future and use it if you ever need it, if you're ever running a pool of your own—which I hope you won't. It's been my golden rule and I paid a lot to learn it. It's this: If you want a secret kept, keep it yourself." He burst into a round, hearty laugh, gazing contentedly into the fire. "Wish I could see Borneman's face. Helped me a lot, Borneman did. You see, Tom," he said, with the human need of boasting a little, which allies such men rather to the child on an adventure than to the criminal, between whom they occupy an indefinable middle position, "you've come in on the drop of the curtain. You've seen the finale of something that'll set Wall Street stewing for years to come. Yes, by George, it's the biggest bit of manipulation by a single operator yet! And look at the crowd I tricked—the inner gang, the crême de la crême, Tom—exactly that!"
"I don't understand it," said Bojo, as Drake began to smile, reflecting over remembered details. He himself understood only confusedly the events which had been whirling about him.
"Tom, the crowd had figured me out for a trimming," said Drake, gleefully, caressing his chin. "They thought the time had come to trim old Drake. You see, they calculated I was loaded up with stocks, crowded to busting and ready to squeal at the slightest squeeze. Now getting rich on paper is one thing and getting rich in the bank's another. Any one can corner anything—but it's all-fired different to get Mr. Fly to come down to your parlor and take some stock after you've got it where you want it. That's what they figured. Dan Drake was loaded to the sky with stocks that looked almighty good on the quotation column, but darned hard to swap for cold, hard cash. That's what they figured, and the strange part about it is they were right.
"But—there's always a but—they hadn't reckoned on the fact that Mr. Me was expecting just what they'd figured out. That's what I told you was the secret of the game—any game—think the way the other man thinks, and then think two jumps ahead of him. Now if I was reasonably sure a certain powerful gang was going to put stocks down, and put them down hard, I might look around to see how that could benefit me at one end while it was annoying me, almightily annoying me, at the other. Now when them coyotes get to juggling stocks they always like to juggle stock they know about—something with a nice little pink ribbon to it, with a president and board of directors on the other end, that'll wriggle in the right direction when the coyotes pull the string.
"Now I'd been particularly hankering after Pittsburgh & New Orleans for quite a while. It was good in their old Southern system, but it looked mighty better outside of it. In independent hands it could stir up a lot of trouble; sort of like a plain daughter in a rich man's house—no one notices her until she runs off with the chauffeur. That was my idea. Only Pittsburgh was high. But—again the but—if some particular breed of coyote would be obliging enough to run it down along with a lot of other properties on the market, I might pitch in and help them force it down to where I could pick up what I wanted from the bargain counter. See?"
"But you sold openly," said Bojo, amazed.
"Exactly. Sold it where they could see it and bought it back twice over, ten times over, where they couldn't. Very simple process. All great processes are simple, and it never dawned on those monumental intelligences that they were fetchin' and carryin' for yours truly until they woke up at six o'clock to-day to find while they were scrambling in the dark, the chauffeur had run off with Miss Pittsburgh!"
He turned and walked to the table desk, motioning to Bojo.
"Come over here, look at it." He held out a check for ten million dollars. "You don't see one of those fellows very often. Great man, Gunther. When he's got to act he doesn't waste time. Right to the point. 'We are satisfied you have control. What's your terms?' 'Ten millions and what the stock cost me.' 'We accept your terms,' Great man, Gunther. Suppose I might have added another million, but it wouldn't have sounded as well, would it? Something rather nice about costs and ten million!"
As he spoke, he had drawn out his check-book and filled out a check to Bojo.