From the start the new firm did well. Colonel Thornton and two or three
friends who followed him from Tracy & Middleton’s office, all of them
“plungers,” were almost enough to keep Hayward busy on the Exchange
executing orders, and, moreover, new customers were coming in. Had he
been satisfied with this start, and with letting time do the rest, he
would have fared very well. But he began to speculate for himself, and
all reputable commission men will tell you, with varying degrees of
emphasis, that this not only “ties up” the firm’s money, but that no man
can “trade”—speculate—on his own hook and at the same time do justice to
his customers.
Thornton was a rich man, and protected his own speculations more than
amply. He noticed the development of his young partner’s gambling
proclivities, and remonstrated with him—in a kindly, paternal sort of
way.
Sally vowed he would stop.
Within less than three months he had broken his promise twice, and his
unsuccessful operations in Alabama Coal at one time threatened seriously
to embarrass the firm.
Colonel Thornton came to the rescue.
Sally promised, with a solemnity born of sincere fear, never to do it
again.
But fright lasts but a little space, and memory is equally short-lived.
Wall Street has no room for men with an excess of timidity or of
recollection. He had gambled before he joined the New York Stock
Exchange. After all, if speculating were a crime and convictions could
be secured in fifty out of a hundred flagrant instances, one half the
male population of the United States would perforce consist of
penitentiary guards forever engaged in watching over the convicted other
half, Sally told a customer one day.
And then, too, Willis N. Hayward, the Board member of Thornton &
Hayward, was a very different person from Sally, the nice little
telephone-boy of Tracy & Middleton’s. His cheeks were not pink; they
were mottled. His eyes were not clear and ingenuous; they were shifty
and a bit watery. He had been in Wall Street eight or ten years, and he
overworked his nerves every day from 10 A.M. to 3 P.M. on the Stock
Exchange; also from 5 P.M. to midnight at the café of a big up-town
hotel, where Wall Street men gathered to talk shop. His system craved
stimulants; gambling and liquor were the strongest he knew.
When, after three years, the firm expired by limitation, Colonel
Thornton withdrew. He had had enough of Hayward’s plunging. To be sure,
Sally had become a shrewd “trader,” and he had made $75,000 during the
big bull boom; but he was at heart a “trader,” which is to say, a mere
gambler in stocks, and not a desirable commission man.
But Sally, flushed with success on the bull side, did not worry when
Thornton refused to continue the partnership. The slogan was “Buy A. O.
T. It’s sure to go up!” the initial standing for _Any Old Thing_! The
most prosperous period in the industrial and commercial history of the
United States begot an epidemic of speculative madness such as was never
before known, and probably never again will be. Everybody had money in
abundance, and the desire for speculation in superabundance. Sally
formed a new firm immediately—Hayward & Co.—with his cashier as partner.