I went in. Dolan was sitting at his desk. He swung around and said, “Sit down, Livingston.”
He pointed to a chair. My last hope vanished. I don’t know how he discovered who I was; perhaps from the hotel register.
“What do you want to see me about?” I asked him.
“Listen, kid. I ain’t got nothin’ agin yeh, see? Nothin’ at all. See?”
“No, I don’t see,” I said.
He got up from his swivel chair. He was a whopping big guy. He said to me, “Just come over here, Livingston, will yeh?” and he walked to the door. He opened it and then he pointed to the customers in the big room.
“D’ yeh see them?” he asked.
“See what?”
“Them guys. Take a look at ‘em, kid. There’s three hundred of ‘em! Three hundred suckers! They feed me and my family. See? Three hundred suckers! Then yeh come in, and in two days yeh cop more than I get out of the three hundred in two weeks. That ain’t business, kid – not for me! I ain’t got nothin’ agin yeh. Yer welcome to what ye’ve got. But yeh don’t get any more. There ain’t any here for yeh!”
“Why, I —
“That’s all. I seen yeh come in day before yesterday, and I didn’t like yer looks. On the level, I didn’t. I spotted yeh for a ringer. I called in that jackass there” – he pointed to the guilty clerk – “and asked what you’d done; and when he told me I said to him: ‘I don’t like that guy’s looks. He’s a ringer!’ And that piece of cheese says: ‘Ringer my eye, boss! His name is Horace Kent, and he’s a rah-rah boy playing at being used to long pants. He’s all right!’ Well, I let him have his way. That blankety-blank cost me twenty-eight hundred dollars. I don’t grudge it yeh, my boy. But the safe is locked for yeh.”
“Look here – ” I began.
“You look here, Livingston,” he said. “I’ve heard all about yeh. I make my money coppering suckers’ bets, and yeh don’t belong here. I aim to be a sport and yer welcome to what yeh pried off’n us. But more of that would make me a sucker, now that I know who yeh are. So toddle along, sonny!”
I left Dolan’s place with my twenty-eight hundred dollars’ profit. Teller’s place was in the same block. I had found out that Teller was a very rich man who also ran up a lot of pool rooms. I decided to go to his bucket shop. I wondered whether it would be wise to start moderately and work up to a thousand shares or to begin with a plunge, on the theory that I might not be able to trade more than one day. They get wise mighty quick when they’re losing and I did want to buy one thousand B. R. T. I was sure I could take four or five points out of it. But if they got suspicious or if too many customers were long of that stock they might not let me trade at all. I thought perhaps I’d better scatter my trades at first and begin small.
It wasn’t as big a place as Dolan’s, but the fixtures were nicer and evidently the crowd was of a better class. This suited me down to the ground and I decided to buy my one thousand B. R. T. So I stepped up to the proper window and said to the clerk, “I’d like to buy some B. R. T. What’s the limit?”
“There’s no limit,” said the clerk. “You can buy all you please – if you’ve got the money.”
“Buy fifteen hundred shares,” I says, and took my roll from my pocket while the clerk starts to write the ticket.
Then I saw a red-headed man just shove that clerk away from the counter. He leaned across and said to me, “Say, Livingston, you go back to Dolan’s. We don’t want your business.”
“Wait until I get my ticket,” I said. “I just bought a little B. R. T.”
“You get no ticket here,” he said. By this time other clerks had got behind him and were looking at me. “Don’t ever come here to trade. We don’t take your business. Understand?”
There was no sense in getting mad or trying to argue, so I went back to the hotel, paid my bill and took the first train back to New York. It was tough. I wanted to take back some real money and that Teller wouldn’t let me make even one trade.
I got back to New York, paid Fullerton his five hundred, and started trading again with the St. Louis money. I had good and bad spells, but I was doing better than breaking even. After all, I didn’t have much to unlearn; only to grasp the one fact that there was more to the game of stock speculation than I had considered before I went to Fullerton’s office to trade. I was like one of those puzzle fans, doing the crossword puzzles in the Sunday supplement. He isn’t satisfied until he gets it. Well, I certainly wanted to find the solution to my puzzle. I thought I was done with trading in bucket shops. But I was mistaken.
About a couple of months after I got back to New York an old jigger came into Fullerton’s office. He knew A. R. Somebody said they’d once owned a string of race horses together. It was plain he’d seen better days. I was introduced to old McDevitt. He was telling the crowd about a bunch of Western race-track crooks who had just pulled off some skin game out in St. Louis. The head devil, he said, was a pool-room owner by the name of Teller.
“What Teller?” I asked him.
“Hi Teller; H. S. Teller.”
“I know that bird,” I said.
“He’s no good,” said McDevitt.
“He’s worse than that,” I said, “and I have a little matter to settle with him.”
“Meaning how?”
“The only way I can hit any of these short sports is through their pocketbook. I can’t touch him in St. Louis just now, but some day I will.” And I told McDevitt my grievance.
“Well,” says old Mac, “he tried to connect here in New York and couldn’t make it, so he’s opened a place in Hoboken. The word’s gone out that there is no limit to the play and that the house roll has got the Rock of Gibraltar faded to the shadow of a bantam flea.”
“What sort of a place?” I thought he meant pool room.
“Bucket shop,” said McDevitt.
“Are you sure it’s open?”
“Yes; I’ve seen several fellows who’ve told me about it.”
“That’s only hearsay,” I said. “Can you find out positively if it’s running, and also how heavy they’ll really let a man trade?”
“Sure, sonny,” said McDevitt. “I’ll go myself to-morrow morning, and come back here and tell you.”
He did. It seems Teller was already doing a big business and would take all he could get. This was on a Friday. The market had been going up all that week – this was twenty years ago, remember – and it was a cinch the bank statement on Saturday would show a big decrease in the surplus reserve. That would give the conventional excuse to the big room traders to jump on the market and try to shake out some of the weak commission-house accounts. There would be the usual reactions in the last half hour of the trading, particularly in stocks in which the public had been the most active. Those, of course, also would be the very stocks that Teller’s customers would be most heavily long of, and the shop might be glad to see some short selling in them. There is nothing so nice as catching the suckers both ways; and nothing so easy – with one-point margins.
That Saturday morning I chased over to Hoboken to the Teller place. They had fitted up a big customers’ room with a dandy quotation board and a full force of clerks and a special policeman in gray. There were about twenty-five customers.
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