WHAT JACK PICKED UP ON WALL STREET.
“Hello! What kept you so long?” exclaimed Frank Simpson when Jack
entered the outer office on his return from his Exchange Place errand.
“There was a little excitement over at Hartz’s office that tangled
everybody up. I’ll tell you about it in a moment.” And Jack steered
himself into the manager’s office, delivered the envelope, and
explained the cause of the delay.
“What! Oliver Bird tried to blow his brains out in Hartz’s office, eh?
I heard he was one of the shorts that were badly squeezed yesterday in
D. P. & Q. stock,” said Mr. Bishop. “How did the affair end?”
Jack explained as modestly as possible the hand he had had in the
matter.
“Upon my word, you saved the man’s life, then. Why, Bird is a big,
strong man, and he must have been half crazy at the time. How did you
manage to do it?”
“I made a jump and grabbed his hand just as he pulled the trigger.
That’s all I know about it.”
“Your presence of mind prevented a sad tragedy. Bird is a good fellow,
and it is evident Hartz turned the screws on him down to the last
notch. Nothing short of absolute ruin would cause Oliver to lose his
head. The fact that he had a revolver shows that he went to Hartz in a
desperate frame of mind. It seems to me, young man,” added Mr. Bishop,
with a smile, “that you are determined to keep your name before the
public. If you are not interviewed by a reporter inside of thirty
minutes I shall be much surprised.”
“Say, Jack, you’re a wonder!” exclaimed Frank Simpson, after the new
messenger had narrated to him the affair at Hartz’s office. “I’ve just
been reading the account in the ‘Herald’ of how you saved the boss’s
niece, Fanny, from drowning in the East River. All the clerks are
talking about you. Gee! I wish I had your nerve!”
But the two boys hadn’t much time for talking.
Business was beginning to rush on Wall Street.
Simpson was presently sent on an errand down Broad Street, and shortly
afterward Jack was sent to the New Street entrance of the Stock
Exchange with an envelope for Mr. Atherton, who was busy on the floor.
It was several minutes before he was able to reach Mr. Atherton, and
during that interval the boy gazed upon the tumultuous scene before him
with something like wonder, for it was new to him.
The crowd of brokers was divided into a dozen or more groups, more or
less clearly defined, shrinking or increasing in size from time to
time as the excitement grew or waned around that particular bone of
contention.
And the roar and hubbub flowed and ebbed in like manner in different
sections of the Exchange floor.
“I’ll sell a thousand at eighty-six and an eighth!” shouted Mr.
Atherton.
At this, half a dozen clamorous hands were raised and shaken at him
furiously.
“Any part of a thousand at eighty-six,” continued the broker.
At this, Jack saw Hartz break into the circle with his hand upraised
and a wild Comanche yell.
Atherton said something, and both men made entries on their tablets.
Shortly afterward Mr. Atherton withdrew from the bunch, and then Jack
saw his opportunity to deliver his message.
He received several slips in return, with orders to hurry back to the
office.
Simpson was out, and he had no chance this time to warm the seat of the
chair, for Mr. Bishop sent him out again immediately.
And he was kept on the go with scarcely a chance to swallow a cup of
coffee and eat a sandwich, until after the Exchange closed, at three
o’clock.
“Mr. Bird has been here inquiring for you, Jack,” said Mr. Bishop, as
the lad laid the firm’s bank-book on his desk after making the day’s
deposit. “He wants to see you at his office. You had better run over
now.”
“All right, sir.” And the lad passed out into the street again.
As he approached the entrance of a certain prominent trust company he
noticed a large envelope lying on the pavement.
Three or four persons passed it by, and one of them actually trod on it.
It looked as though it had been discarded by some one, and Jack, whose
first idea had been to pick it up, felt ashamed to touch it lest some
of the kids coming along should give him the laugh.
He was about to pass it when a D. T. messenger, rushing out of the
trust company, gave it a kick, sending it flying against Jack’s feet,
and then the boy concluded to examine it, for the way it had flown
through the air showed it to be at least a bit weightier than an empty
envelope.
And it was, for a fact.
As Jack hurried on, he counted six one-thousand-dollar, one
five-hundred-dollar, and two one-hundred-dollar bank-notes. And that
was all. No memorandum, and no name or address either inside or outside.
“Gee whiz!” he exclaimed. “Sixty seven hundred dollars, and no clue to
the owner! And to think I’d have passed it by like a score of other
people have done, if it hadn’t been for that little messenger kid
kicking it almost into my hands. Who does it belong to? Some fellows
might say--and Denny McFadden is one of that kind--that findings is
keepings, but I’m not built that way. I’ll hand it over to Mr. Bishop,
and perhaps he will hear of the party that lost it. At any rate, it
doesn’t belong to me, and I have no right to keep it.”
Jack, who had been brought up to regard honesty as the best policy,
stowed the envelope away in an inside pocket of his jacket, and then
mounted the stairs leading to Oliver Bird’s office.
The boy was admitted to Mr. Bird’s inner sanctum, and the big broker no
sooner recognized him than he jumped up from his desk, and, seizing him
by both hands, shook them warmly.
“By George! I don’t know how to thank you for saving my life this
morning,” he said, in a voice that quivered with emotion. “I certainly
was not in my right senses at the time, and but for your quickness and
nerve I would have been a corpse a moment later. Think what a shock
you have saved my family! Young man, I shall be grateful to you all my
life.”
And while he spoke he held on to the boy’s hands.
“All I can say, Mr. Bird, is that I am glad I happened to be on hand,”
said Jack, frankly. “I hope you won’t worry about what you owe me. I’d
have done the same thing for anyone else under the same circumstances.”
“But I shall worry about it, young man, until I have done something for
you to show my gratitude.”
“I don’t want you to do anything for me, sir. I’m perfectly satisfied
with knowing that I saved you from doing a rash act.”
“But that won’t satisfy me.”
Jack was silent.
“Mr. Bishop told me that you are the boy who saved Mr. Atherton’s
little niece from drowning yesterday morning. Most of the brokers have
read about it in the papers this morning, and I have heard a score of
them talking about you. And now this crazy act of mine is printed in
all the afternoon editions, and I’ll bet if there is one there are a
hundred men about the Street who are trying to get a chance to see what
sort of a boy you look like. Nobody seems to know you as yet. How long
have you been working for Atherton?”
“This is my first day,” replied Jack.
“Well, I thought you were new down here, else I had probably seen you
before. I asked Hartz and his chief clerk about you, but they could
tell me nothing more than that you came there from Atherton’s, and that
was the only way I located you. Now I want you to call at my house
to-night; will you? My wife will certainly insist on seeing you.”
“All right,” said Jack, who felt that it wouldn’t be polite to refuse
the broker’s request.
“I’ll try and call about eight o’clock,” said the boy, cheerfully.
“I shall expect you,” said Mr. Bird, shaking him again warmly by the
hand as Jack bade him good-bye and left.
On his return to the office Jack asked Mr. Bishop if he could see him
for a moment.
“Certainly,” replied the manager.
“I wish to put this in your hands till it is claimed by the rightful
owner,” said the boy, handing Mr. Bishop the envelope with its precious
contents.
“Why, where did you pick it up?” asked the astonished manager after he
had counted the bills.
“On Wall Street, this side of the Blank Trust Company.”
Mr. Bishop looked at him earnestly.
“I don’t want any greater evidence than this that you are a thoroughly
honest lad,” he said, emphatically. “Mr. Atherton will be greatly
pleased to hear of this. It would certainly be a great temptation for
many boys, and for that matter, many men, to hold on to this money and
say nothing about it--the more especially as there is nothing either
on or inside the envelope to identify the owner. I will be glad to
attend to the matter. As the amount is a large one, it will probably be
advertised for at once. Whatever reward is offered, it will of course
be quite right for you to accept.”
Mr. Bishop deposited the envelope, just as it was, in the office safe,
and soon afterward the office closed for the day, and Jack started to
walk uptown, stopping on Vandewater Street for his chum, Ed Potter, who
got away at 5:30.