It was my part to keep up these anticipations and by hook or crook prevent Rogers and Rockefeller from unloading. I bought and bought to steady the market when no one else apparently would buy; and when I found others whom I could induce to venture, I had them relieve those who were faltering and who must sell. When Mr. Rogers took me to task, I invented all manner of excuses to account for my tardiness in creating a market on which he could unload his holdings. He listened impatiently and incredulously, and I felt that sooner or later he would take the bit in his teeth.
In spite of my efforts the price of Amalgamated dropped and dropped and it was all I could do to prevent a quick crash. My profits—the immense sum of money I had obtained at the settlement—had been used up, together with the great sums I had borrowed on my own allotment of shares. At intervals I stopped long enough to make brief excursions into sugar or other stocks, out of which I captured additional hundreds of thousands, but every cent of such gains went toward staying the avalanche. These indeed were days of desperation and black despair, all the more trying because I had to look happy and talk hopefully; all the more difficult because my enemies came out of their holes and did their share to balk my efforts; all the more painful because the public were beginning to doubt whether the second section was coming—and whether it had best come—and our Boston "Coppers" had begun to drop in value.
During all this time I had troubled myself but little about the Flower pool, which had been set going soon after the conversation in which Mr. Rogers had told me that he and Mr. Rockefeller intended to unload their stock. I concluded that the pool would surely get a share of what they had to sell, and showed no inclination to join in with it. But at last Mr. Rogers said to me:
"As every one is going into the pool, Lawson, it will seem strange if you are missing, so you had better send Flower your check and I will see you get it back later."
"For how much?" I asked him.
"A hundred thousand will be about right," he answered, and I sent it, and that was all I had heard of the subject until one day after the stock had been weaker than usual I received by mail a brusk notice from Flower & Co. to mail them another hundred thousand dollars. Immediately I called up the banking-house, and learned to my horror and astonishment that the pool had accumulated over 225,000 shares. I went at once to Mr. Rogers with Flower's call and said:
"I know nothing whatever of this affair, Mr. Rogers, and as I have not been unloading any of my stock and have all I can do to keep up my end anyway, you will look after it, of course."
He took the notice and said: "I will attend to it." Remembering his intentions to unload, after what I had heard of the pool's accumulations I was not surprised at Mr. Rogers' willingness to take care of this matter of mine. It is of interest now, in looking back over our affairs, to recall that though there were several periods later when the sledding was hard, and I needed all the money I could lay hands on, he never offered to return me that hundred thousand, not even after the pool had liquidated, as will be shown later. In spite of this fact, in his readiness to hurl any charge or insult at me, he had his hireling, Denis Donohoe, recently make the accusation that I alone of all its members refused to keep up my payments to the Flower pool.