Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/616

568 with an occasional thirst, a lodge life-insurance policy for a thousand dollars, and three hundred shares of Lakeside and Western stock. This stock was held for him in the office of John D. Mitchell and Co., of the New York Stock Exchange, through whom he had speculated for years with varying but never very great success, using it as a margin. He had bought it on a "slump" for $60 a share. After the estate was settled the widow had left the stock in the brokers' office,—her husband had done so, and she would loyally continue. She might, also, lose the certificates by theft, fire, or mice if she kept them at home in the bureau drawer. She often spoke to her friends about her brokers in Wall Street and greatly enjoyed it. But she said nothing about her intuitive confidence in their honesty and her deep conviction that they knew more about her one investment than she did. Out of a kindly feeling for a genial client of theirs, who had been wont to keep them well informed on railroad rate wars in his section, when such information, early, meant dollars in the stock-market, they took charge of the stock and regularly mailed her the dividends. The shares paid five per cent, per annum; on the $1500 thus derived Mrs. Buxton lived, and even saved for her five-year-old Freddie. Often she deprived herself, often unnecessarily, of little luxuries. The discomfort of it comforted her.

At that moment Wall Street was very much interested in Lakeside stock. So was young Beekman Stuyvesant. He was the grandson of Beekman the First, the founder of the greatest railroad dynasty in the country, who, in addition to many millions, had left to his family the Golden Wonder of the Name—otherwise the prestige of success.

Old Beekman Stuyvesant, many years before, when the Street still called him the Pirate, had unexpectedly secured control of the majority of the company's stock, put in a board of directors of his own, and made it a "Stuyvesant road," like the Great Midland, which was a far greater system, and was known as the Stuyvesant Family Cow. The old gentleman had sold out a great deal of his Lakeside stock at a beautiful profit, but the Golden Wonder of the Name kept it a Stuyvesant road. It prospered mightily, in spite of the family's milking, and paid five per cent. dividends on its stock regularly. But it earned more. So Beekman III. conceived the idea of a nice little bull, or upward, movement in the stock. It was playing with loaded dice, he thought, being an insider and having millions and the Golden Wonder. He did not see how he could lose.

"You know," Mrs. Buxton once told a friend, with a deprecating smile at the pride she felt in being a fellow stockholder of theirs, "the Stuyvesants own most of it!" They didn't; but there were many Mrs. Buxtons in the United States. In American finance, as in politics, it is not always the majority who rules.

So Beekman III. began to buy Lakeside stock, and he bought and bought until he had accumulated 30,000 shares. The price rose to 115, as Mr. Mitchell wrote to Mrs. Buxton. To be enabled to sell out his stock at 120, the Stuyvesant brokers pushed the price up to 130 and tried to unload. To lead a horse to water is one thing; to make him drink is ten thousand. To advance the price of a stock by means of the boosting power of the dollars requires no great art. To make the public buy it at the high price requires many arts, some of them black. The devil, the Spaniards say, can do so many clever things not because he is devilishly clever, but because he is devilishly old; and Beekman III. was very young.

So the price was put up to 150, and then the Lakeside stock began to pour on the market. It was too high a price for a five-per-cent. stock, experts thought. To silence their criticism and also to facilitate the unloading a complaisant board of directors raised the dividend to six per cent. per annum. On the glad news, the price rose four points, thanks to sixteen industrious brokers. But nobody else bought. Relatively, Lakeside was dearer at $150 paying six per cent, a year than the same stock at $96 paying five per cent. The third Beekman Stuyvesant had "overstayed" his market. It was a heinous crime in Wall Street—the crime of stupidity.

So the bears, not content with being merely disagreeable, permitted themselves to be logical. They sold more.