MR. FOX SOLVES HIS GREAT PROBLEM, AND MR. WALLINGFORD FALLS WITH A THUD
They arrived in Chicago late and they arose late. At breakfast, with
languid interest, Wallingford picked up the paper that lay beside his
plate, and the first item upon which his eyes rested was a sensational
article headed: "BROKER SUICIDES." Even then he was scarcely interested
until his eye caught the name of Edwin H. Fox.
"What is the matter?" asked his wife anxiously, as, with a startled
exclamation, he hastily pushed back his chair and arose. It was the
first time that she had ever in any emergency seen his florid face turn
ghastly pale. Dilemmas, reverses and even absolute defeats he had always
accepted with a gambler's coolness, but now, since his vanity had let
him dignify his pursuit of other people's money by the name of
financiering, the blow came with crushing force; for it maimed not only
his pocketbook but his pride as it swept away the glittering air
castles that he had been building for the past year.
"Matter!" he spluttered, half choking. "We are broke!" And leaving his
breakfast untasted he hastily ordered a cab and drove to the office of
Fox & Fleecer, devouring the details of the tragedy as he went. The
philanthropic Mr. Fox, he of the glistening bald pate and the air of
cold probity, the man who had been for thirty years in business at the
old stand, who had seemed as firm as a rock and as unsusceptible as a
quart of clams, had been leading not only a double but a sextuple life,
for half a dozen pseudo-widows mourned his demise and the loss of a
generous banker. To support all these expensive establishments, which,
once set up, firmly declined to ever go out of existence, Mr. Fox had
been juggling with the money of his customers; robbing Peter to pay
Paul, until the time had come when Paul could be no longer paid and
there was only one debt left that he could by any possibility wipe
out--the debt he owed to Nature. That he had paid with a forty-four
caliber bullet through the temple. At last he had solved that perplexing
problem which had bothered him all these years.
Wallingford had expected to find the office of Fox & Fleecer closed,
but the door stood wide open and the dingy apartment was filled with a
crowd of men, all equally nervous but violently contrasted as to
complexion, some of them being extremely pale and some extremely
flushed, according to their temperaments. Mr. Fleecer, one of those
strangest of all anomalies, a nervous fat man, stood behind Mr. Fox's
desk, his collar wilted with perspiration and the flabby pouches under
his eyes black from his vigil of the night. He was almost as large as
Wallingford himself, but a careless dresser, and a pitiable object as he
started back on hearing Wallingford's name, tossing up his right hand
with a curious involuntary motion as if to ward off a blow. His crisp,
quick voice, however, did not fit at all with his appearance of crushed
indecision.
"I might as well tell you the blunt truth at first, Mr. Wallingford," he
said. "You haven't a cent, so far as Fox & Fleecer is concerned. Nobody
has. I haven't a dollar in the world and Fox was head over heels in
debt, I find. How that sanctimonious old hypocrite ever got away with it
all these years is the limit. I looked after the buying and selling
orders as he gave them to me, and never had anything to do with the
books. I never knew when a deal was in the office until I received
market orders. I have spent all night on Fox's private accounts,
however, and since yours was the largest item, I naturally went into it
as deeply as I could. If they had telephones in Hell I could give you
more accurate information, but the way I figure it is this: when he got
hold of your four hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars with
instructions to buy and not to close until it reached a dollar and a
quarter, he evidently classed your proposition as absurd. There was
absolutely nothing to make wheat go to that price, and, with the big
margin you had put up, he figured that the account would drag along at
least until September, without being touched; so he used what he had to
have of the money to cover up his other steals, expecting to juggle the
market with the rest of it on his own judgment, and expecting, in the
end, to have it back to hand to you when you got tired. When he
understood this upward movement, however, and saw the big thing you had
done, he jumped into the market with what was left, something less than
three hundred thousand dollars. The only way to make that up to the
amount you should have by the time it reached a dollar and a quarter was
to pyramid it, and this he did. He bought on short margin, closed when
he had a good profit, and spread the total amount over other short
margin purchases. He did this three times. On the last deal he had
upward of five million bushels bought to your account, and it was this
strong buying, coupled with the other buying orders which came in at
about the dollar-and-a-quarter mark, that sent the market up to a dollar
thirty-four. If the market could have held half an hour he would have
gotten out all right and turned over to you a million dollars, after
using two hundred and fifty thousand for his own purposes, but when he
attempted to unload the market broke; and by ---- we're all broke!"
Mr. Wallingford laughed, quite mechanically, and from his pocket drew
two huge black cigars with gold bands around them.
"Have a smoke," he said to Mr. Fleecer.
Lighting his own Havana he turned and elbowed his way out of the room.
One of the men who had stood near him exchanged a wondering stare with
his neighbor.
"That's the limit of gameness," he observed.
But he was mistaken. It was not gameness. Wallingford was merely dazed.
He could find no words to express the bitter depth to which he had
fallen. As he passed out through the ticker-room he glanced at the
blackboard. The boy was just chalking up the latest morning quotation on
September wheat--a dollar twelve.
In the cab he opened his pocketbook and counted the money in it. Before
he had started on this trip he had scarcely thought of money, except
that at Fox & Fleecer's there would be waiting for him a cool, clean
million. Instead of that he found himself with exactly fifty-four
dollars.
Mrs. Wallingford was in her room, pale to the lips.
"How much money have you?" he asked her.
Without a word she handed him her purse. A few small bills were in it.
She handed him another small black leather case which he took slowly. He
opened it, and from the velvet depths there gleamed up at him the old
standby--her diamonds. He could get a couple of thousand dollars on
these at any time. He put the case in his pocket, but without any gleam
of satisfaction, and sat down heavily in one of the huge leather-padded
chairs.
"Fanny," said he savagely, "never preach to me again! I have tried a
straight-out legitimate deal and it dumped me. Hereafter, be satisfied
with whatever way I make money, just so long as I have the law on my
side. Why," and his indignation over this last reflection was beyond
expression, "I've coaxed a carload of money out of the farmers of this
country, and I don't get away with a cent of it! A thief got it! _A
thief and a grafter!_"
Mrs. Wallingford did not answer him. She was crying. It was not so much
that they had lost all of this money, it was not that he had spoken
harshly to her for almost the first time since he had come into her
life, but the shattering once more of certain hopeful dreams that had
grown up within her since their sojourn in Battlesburg. Of course, he
was instantly regretful and made such clumsy amends as he could, but the
sting, not of bitterness but of sorrow, was there, and it remained for
long after; until, in fact, she came to realize how much to heart her
husband had taken his only real defeat. For the first time in his life
he became despondent. The height to which he had aspired and had almost
reached, looked now so utterly unattainable that the contemplation of it
took out of him all ambition, all initiative, all life. He seemed to
have lost his creative faculty. Where his fertile brain had heretofore
teemed with plans and projects, crowding upon each other, clamoring for
fulfilment, now he seemed incapable of thought, and fell into an apathy
from which he could not arouse himself no matter how hard he tried.
Parting company with Blackie Daw, who seemed equally rudderless, they
moved aimlessly about from city to city, pawning Mrs. Wallingford's
diamonds as they needed the money, but the man's spirit was gone, and no
matter how often he changed his environment or brought himself into
contact with new fields and new opportunities, no plan for getting back
upon his feet seemed to offer itself. He was too much disheartened, in
fact, even to try. To husband their fast waning resources they even
descended to living in boarding houses, where the brief gratification of
exciting awe among the less impressive boarders was but small
compensation for the loss of the luxury to which they had been used.
It was the sight of a miserable dinner in one of these boarding houses
that proved the turning point for him. His chair was drawn back from the
table for him when he suddenly shoved it to its place again, and with a
darkening brow stalked out of the dining room, followed by the
bewildered Mrs. Wallingford.
"I can't stand this thing, Fanny," he declared. "I've insulted my
stomach with that sort of fodder until it's too late for an apology."
"What are you going to do?" she asked in concern.
"Go where the good steaks grow," he answered emphatically. "We're going
to pack up and move to the best hotel in town and eat ourselves blue in
the face, and to-morrow J. Rufus is going to go back on the job. I
haven't the money in my pocket to pay for it, and we haven't another
thing we can soak, but if I run up a hotel bill I'll have to get out and
dig to pay it, and that's what I need. I'm lazy."
It was a positive elation to him to dash up in a cab to a palatial
hotel, to walk into its gilded and marble corridors with a deferential
porter carrying his luggage, to loom up before a suave clerk in his
impressive immensity and sign his name with a flourish, to demand the
best accommodations they had in the house and to be shown into
apartments that bathed him once more in a garish atmosphere where
everything tasted and felt and smelled of money. It was like the
prodigal son coming home again, and instantly his spirits arose with a
bound. He began as of old to live like a lord, and though the long
sought idea did not come to him for almost two weeks, he held to the
untroubled tenor of his way with all his old arrogance, blessed with a
cheerful belief that some lucky solution of his difficulties would be
found.
One thing alone bothered him toward the last, and that was the rapid
disappearance of such little ready money as he needed for tips when he
was in the hotel, and for drinks and cigars when he found himself away
from it. He was sensitive about ordering inferior goods in good places,
and when away from his source of credit supplies, took to turning in at
obscure cigar stores, preferring to buy the best they had rather than to
taking a second grade in a better place. It was in one of these obscure
little establishments that the elusive inspiration at last came to him.
"The government is rotten!" the stoop-shouldered cigar maker had
complained just a moment before, rasping the air of his dingy little
store with a high-pitched voice that was almost a whine. "It fosters
consolidations. Big profits for rich men and bankruptcy for poor men,
that's what we have come to!"
The stoop-shouldered cigar maker had no chin worth mentioning, and grew
a thin, down-pointed mustache which accentuated that lack. He wore a
green eye-shade and an apron of bed ticking, and he held in his hand a
split mold, gripping the two parts together while he feebly and
hopelessly groped for an inspiration in the mending line. The flabby man
in the greasy vest, who was playing solitaire with a pack of cards so
grimy that it took an experienced eye to tell whether the backs or the
faces were up, did not raise his head, nor did the apathetic young man
with the chronic dent in his time-yellowed Derby, who, sitting
motionless with his crossed arms resting on his knees, had been making a
business of watching the solitaire game in silence.
"That's right," agreed the flabby man, laying the trey of diamonds
carefully upon the four of clubs and peeping to see what the next card
would have been; "all the laws are against the poor man, and we're
ground right down."
A pimple-faced youngster, clearly below the legal age, came in and
bought two cigarettes for a cent, and the cigar maker waited upon him in
sour-visaged nonchalance; neither the solitaire expert nor his
interested watcher raised his eyes; a young man with a flashy tie and a
soiled collar bought three stogies for a nickel and still apathy
reigned; then Wallingford's huge bulk darkened the open doorway and
everybody woke up.
Wallingford was so large that he seemed to crowd the little shop and
absorb all its light, and he approached the cigar case doubtingly,
surveying its contents with the eye of a _connoisseur_. A brand or two
that he knew quite well he passed over, for the boxes were nearly empty
and no doubt had been reeking for a long time in that sponge-moistened
assortment of flavors, but finally he settled upon a newly opened box
from which but two cigars had been sold, and tapped his finger on the
glass above it. The cigar maker reached in for that box with alacrity,
for they were two-for-a-quarter goods, and as he brought them forth he
gave to the buyer the appreciative scrutiny due one of so impressive
appearance. He did not know that under his inspection the big man
winced. In the fine scarf there should have glowed a huge diamond; the
scarf itself had two or three frayed threads; the binding of the hat
brim was somewhat worn; the cuffs were a little ragged. Wallingford felt
that all the world saw this unwonted condition, but still he smiled
richly; and the cigar dealer saw only richness. Probably the imposing
customer would have left the store in the same silence in which he had
made his purchase, but, as he stopped to fastidiously cut the tip from
one of his cigars, an undersized but pompous young collector bustled in
and threw down a bill.
"Hundred Blue Rings," he announced curtly.
With a mechanical curiosity, Wallingford glanced into the case where a
box of cigars with cheap blue bands was displayed. The cigar maker
opened his money drawer and slowly counted out a pile of small silver.
"Three fifty," he lifelessly whined as he shoved it over, and the
collector receipted the bill, dashing out with the same absurd
self-assertiveness with which he had come in.
"Thirty-five a thousand," observed Wallingford incredulously. "That
price is claimed for every nickel cigar on earth, but I always thought
it was phoney. It's a stiff rate, isn't it?"
"It's a hold up," snarled the other, "but I got to keep 'em. I make a
better cigar myself but people don't know anything about tobacco. They
only smoke advertising. Here's my cigar," and he set a box on the case;
"Ed Nickel's Nickelfine. There's a piece of real goods."
The big man picked one out of the box, and twirled it in his deft
fingers with a scrutiny that betokened keen judgment of all small
articles of manufacture.
"It's well made," he admitted; "but what's the use? I could deliver your
week's output in my pocket, and on the way back could spend the money
getting my shoes shined; all because you haven't the wherewith to
advertise."
"I got a little money," insisted the other aggressively, touched on a
point of pride; "money I saved and pinched and scraped together; but it
ain't enough to push a cigar. Some of these big manufacturers spread
around a fortune on a new brand before they sell a single box. There's
John Crewly & Company. They spent a hundred thousand dollars advertising
Blue Rings."
"And you small dealers have handed it back to them," laughed
Wallingford. "You pay that advertising difference above what the cigar
is worth."
"Ten times over!" exploded Mr. Nickel. "The houses that buy in big
quantities get them for below twenty-eight, I've heard. But that's where
the government is rotten! It's fixed so the little man always gets it in
the neck. Combines and trusts eat us up. Every man that joins a
consolidation ought to get ten years at hard labor."
"Don't grouch," advised Wallingford, grinning; "consolidate. If all the
small dealers in this town formed a consolidation, they could buy their
supplies in quantity for spot cash and get the lowest price going."
Ed Nickel looked out of the window at the clanging street cars and
digested this palatable new idea.
"I reckon they could," he mused, "if there was any way to work it so
they wouldn't all spike each other trying to get the best of it," and J.
Rufus chuckled as he recognized this business anarchist's willingness to
undergo an instant change of opinion about consolidation.
The door opened, and a tall, thin man, with curly gray hair and a little
gray goatee, strode nervously in and threw a half dollar on the case.
"Two packs of Kiosks," he demanded.
Almost in the same breath he saw Wallingford, whose face was at that
moment illuminated by the lighter to which he held his cigar.
"J. Rufus, by Heck!" he exclaimed.
Before Wallingford could give voice to his amazement the strangely
altered Blackie Daw was shaking hands eagerly with him.
"You probably don't remember me," went on Blackie with an expansive
grin. "Rush is the name. I. B. Rush, and I never was so bug-house glad
to see anybody in my life!"
The eyes of Wallingford twinkled.
"Well, well, well, Mr. Rush! How you have changed!" he declared.
Blackie shook his head warningly.
"Nix on the advertisement," he cautioned. "Wallingford, you're the
long-sought message from home! Feel in your vest pocket and see if there
isn't an overlooked hundred or two down in the corner."
J. Rufus was cheerful, nay, happy, complaisance itself.
"Certainly, Mr. Rush," he said heartily; "a thousand if you want it.
Just step over to the bank with me till I draw the money," and they
walked out of the door.
With a sigh the flabby man laid the long-suspended jack of hearts upon
the queen of spades.
"Hear the big guy tossin' over a thousand like it was car fare," he
observed. "If I had a piece of lead pipe I'd follow him."
"What do you suppose his graft is?" queried the watcher at the game.
"He's made his money off poor people; that's what!" announced Ed Nickel.
"How else does a man get rich?"