After that Mary Harrison--such was her name--was soon installed in a
pretty little flat up in Harlem; and Robbie, a happy and guileless boy
once more, was to be found there not infrequently. We must content
ourselves with this brief mention of the subject, and hurry back with
our hero to the tedious affairs of Wall Street.
For events moved swiftly in that part of the town; and even before the
Kalamazoo Airship corner had been settled Robert van Rensselaer was
busily planning the great coup of his life,--the smashing of
Transatlantic and Suburban. About that desperate and historical campaign
it is necessary that the reader should be told in detail.
There are men in Wall Street, gamblers pure and simple, who will bull or
bear any stock out of which they think they can get anything; and again
there are also legitimate manipulators. A legitimate manipulator of
stocks, in the view of Robert van Rensselaer, was a man who studied the
financial and economic conditions of the world, and aimed to drive
prices where they ought to go. If a man could see deeply enough, and
bear only unsound stocks and over-produced commodities, he might be
considered as a useful servant of society--and what would be no less
pleasant, the eternal laws of the universe would work with him in all
his trading.
The story of the great Transatlantic and Suburban Railroad battle--the
most sanguinary of all the conflicts of our hero, and one which Wall
Street men will never forget while they live--the reader may find
narrated in Jabbergrab, p. 1906, as follows:--
"It was the same marvellous grasp of conditions and of deep movements,
men say. Van Rensselaer had been watching T. & S. for over a year, and
watching the people who were engineering it. He had studied every phase
of the problem and in the end he pricked a bubble that was shedding a
rainbow effulgence upon mankind, and that had deceived some of the
keenest financiers of the country.
"In the first place Robert van Rensselaer had distrusted the T. & S.
people, knowing some inside facts about them. Then he had studied the
future of the line, its management, its plans, its huge issues of stock,
which men whispered must be watered even while they bought it up like
mad; and then from certain secret information about conferences, of
which no one was supposed to know, from certain suspicious movements in
the market as well, van Rensselaer became sure that the T. & S.
financiers were prepared for a great boom in the stock. He was perfectly
willing,--he helped them along,--for the more they inflated it, the
better could he manage what he meant to do. Only when he thought they
were about exhausted, he turned to the other side; and so began the
battle of the giants."