Page:The Wizard of Wall Street and his Wealth.djvu/94

 murder. It will surprise no one who has read this history thus far that in the course of the Erie litigations a Supreme Court judge once held court and issued orders from Josie Mansfield's apartments. Stokes was tried three times. Once the jury disagreed. Once he was convicted of murder in the first degree and sentenced to be hanged by Judge Noah Davis. This verdict being overruled by the Court of Appeals, he was tried again and convicted of manslaughter in the third degree. After serving a few years in Auburn prison Mr. Stokes returned to New York, where he soon became a prosperous business man, intimate for a long time with John A. Mackay, the California millionaire, and president of a telegraph system competing with Gould's Western Union.

Before his death the belief is that Gould and Fisk had substantially parted company. The New York World of that day gives an account of an interview between Gould and Fisk, in which the former asked Fisk for his resignation as vice-president and comptroller of Erie. Fisk is represented as saying to a friend who was about to leave for Europe: "I would like you to do me a favor. If you find in Europe a mean man who can do a meaner thing to his best friend or tell a bigger lie than Jay Gould, I want you to telegraph me at once." After Fisk's death, however, Gould acted handsomely by his widow. Whatever else may be said of Fisk, he was certainly a more popular man than Gould, and after the former's death Gould did not long remain at the