THE SPIDER AND THE FLY
“Have you dropped as much as that, Reggie?” asked Jim, sharing Joe’s
astonishment.
“I don’t yet know whether I’ve dropped it,” replied Reggie. “But I’ve
invested that much, and the way the bally thing looks now I’m not
likely to get any of it back.”
“Tell me all about it,” urged Joe.
“Well,” said Reggie, his usually placid face creased with lines of
anxiety, “you know perhaps that I had quite a bunch of stocks left to
me by a relative in trust that became mine when I came of age. I’ve
always had a hankerin’ to try my luck in the market――so many fellahs
pickin’ up fortunes there you know――an’ so I put some of these stocks
in the hands of a broker who told me he could double the money for
me in a little while. Oh, I know jolly well what you’re thinkin’――a
fool and his money are soon parted and all that, a sucker born every
minute and sometimes they’re twins――but it looked good, and I took the
chance. He seemed to have lots of experience――――”
“No doubt,” put in Joe. “In other words, you had the stock and he had
the experience. Now he has the stocks and you have the experience. Is
that it?”
“I’m afraid so,” confessed Reggie.
“What is the name of the broker?” asked Joe.
“A fellow named Harrish――――”
“Harrish!” interrupted Joe and Jim in one breath.
“Yes,” said Reggie in some surprise. “Do you know him? He’s in Wall
Street near Nassau.”
“I know him all right,” said Joe grimly. “Know him only too well. It
was only a little while ago that I came within an ace of giving him the
thrashing of his life.”
“My word!” ejaculated Reggie. “What had he done to you?”
“Offered me fifty thousand dollars to throw games so that the Giants
would lose the pennant,” replied Joe. Then after exacting a pledge of
secrecy, he told Reggie of the night he had dined with Harrish and
Tompkinson.
Reggie gasped as he heard the story.
“The bally crook!” he exclaimed. “So that’s the kind of fellow Harrish
is! Makes it look bad for the stocks I trusted him with.”
“He’s so crooked that he could hide behind a corkscrew,” declared Joe.
“But I knocked one of his crooked schemes endways, and perhaps we can
thwart the skin game he’s trying to play on you. But you haven’t told
me yet the ins and outs of your business dealings with him.”
“I’m rather mixed on it myself,” confessed Reggie. “But it was
something like this. I put in the scoundrel’s hands ten thousand
dollars’ worth of stock. He undertook to advance a certain amount
of money on those and use the money in playing the market for my
benefit. Whatever profit there was, was to be placed to my credit after
deducting his commission. If there were any losses――but he said that
with his experience there would hardly ever be any losses――――”
“Of course not,” put in Joe sarcastically.
“If there were any losses,” went on Reggie, “they would be charged up
against my account.”
“Just wait a moment,” interrupted Joe, as a thought struck him.
He reached for the telephone and called for McRae’s number.
“Hello, Mac,” he said, as a voice came to him from the other end of the
wire. “This is Matson speaking. Oh, it’s feeling all right now, thanks.
Guess I’ll be in shape for my next turn in the box. Listen, Mac. Did
you get any dope on those fellows, Harrish and Tompkinson? Did, eh?
Good. Let’s have it.”
He was silent for a minute or two, listening intently.
“Thanks, Mac,” he said at last. “Just about as I thought. No, they
haven’t been bothering me. Guess they don’t want any more of my game.
I want these pointers for a friend of mine. Will tell you all about it
to-morrow. Good-by.”
He hung up the receiver and turned to his friends.
“Harrish is a pretty slick proposition,” he said. “O’Brien at
headquarters has been looking him up for McRae. Came here from
Chicago. Had been indicted there for a shady deal, but the indictment
was quashed. Been under suspicion here in connection with some queer
transactions, but they haven’t been able to get anything definite on
him. Foxy, and has managed to keep out of the clutches of the law since
he’s been in New York.”
“That doesn’t make anything look better for me, does it?” said Reggie
dismally.
“No, it doesn’t,” admitted Joe. “How did you come to get mixed up with
him anyway?”
“Just a chance acquaintance picked up in a hotel lobby,” explained
Reggie. “He got to talking about the easy money to be made in Wall
Street and asked me to drop in at his office.”
“‘Will you walk into my parlor said the spider to the fly,’” murmured
Jim under his breath, too low for Reggie to hear.
“So I went into the bally place one day,” went on Reggie. “Swell
offices, too, if you ask me. My word! Mahogany desks, Persian rugs, all
the fixin’s. Treated me like a prince, dontcherknow. Advised me to put
a hundred on a stock that he said was sure to go up, and, by Jove, it
did! I cleared quite a bit of money.
“Then he said it was a pity I wasn’t livin’ in the city so that I could
watch the ticker and take advantage of opportunities. That was the only
way, he said. Watch the tape and jump in instanter, get in on the rise.
Since I couldn’t be here, though, he said that, if I liked, he would
attend to that for me, look after my money as if it were his own, and
send me daily statements of the way things were going. It was to be a
sort of discretionary account, I think he called it. I was to trust his
judgment and he’d do the best he could for me.”
“What he meant was that he’d do you the best he could,” commented Joe.
“Well, did he send you the statements? And what did they show?”
“I got the statements all right,” said Reggie. “But they mostly showed
a loss. Once in a while I’d make a little, but nine times out of ten
I had a loss. He kept callin’ for more margins, and each time he did
it I had to borrow a little more money from him on the stocks he was
holding as collateral to supply the margins. And now, by his showing,
the money he has advanced to cover the losses has just about eaten up
the value of the stocks.”
“In other words, he has your ten thousand dollars’ worth of stocks, you
have some phony statements showing pretended losses, and you’re left
holding the bag,” summed up Joe. “It looks to me like the old bucket
shop game. Ten to one he’s never bought a single one of the stocks he
told you he was buying on your account. It’s just been a matter of
juggling his books. At the end of each day he’s simply picked out a
stock that has registered a loss, put that stock down in your statement
as one he had purchased on your account, and pocketed just that much
more of your money. Once in a while he let you win just to keep you on
the hook. You haven’t even had a run for your money.”
“Probably that’s the game, but it may be a mighty hard thing to prove
it,” remarked Jim. “It’s likely that he’s covered his tracks pretty
well.”
“Not so well that we may not be able to find them!” exclaimed Joe,
jumping to his feet. “Reggie, we’ll go down and have a showdown with
Harrish the first thing to-morrow morning.”
“Beard the lion in his den?” asked Jim.
“No,” said Joe grimly. “Trail the skunk to his hole!”