“This surely means a slaughter of the little fishes,” mused Vreeland.
Rumors of a reincorporation of the seventy-five million dollar capitalized company in New Jersey, the threatened move to divide its capital stock into common and preferred, were rife on the Street.
“Ah!” growled Vreeland, as he glanced over a tabulated statement of the ratings since its organization. “This may either send the stock, now at seventy, down to forty or fifty, or up to a hundred and twenty-five. If I only knew?”
He laughed mockingly as he dismissed the subject. “It will only be double or quits.”
“Double their wealth for the insiders—and quits for the poor devils squeezed to the wall!” While he waited in the drawing-room for his patroness, the woman whom he began to fear he never would make his dupe or slave, he pondered over her real purposes in the vast hidden speculations.
“Has she not already money enough?” he enviously thought, gazing on the heaped-up splendors of costly taste around him. And then, he remembered that he had never met any man, woman, or child in New York City who had money enough.
“It’s the fashionable craze—money-getting, by hook or crook,” he reflected.
“And once mixed up in the game, it’s hard for her to leave it, especially if she is the go-between who links some of the nation’s statesmen to the great insiders of the Trust.
“This home may be only a sham, Lakemere only a way station for the friendly conspirators, and that paper may be a dangerous document which neither side would dare to hold. And old Endicott, too—what’s his rôle?”
He was the more interested as Justine had swept away all suspicions of an amourette between the two whom he feared.