Blindfolded by Earle Ashley Walcott (recommended ebook reader txt) 📕

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"Inquest this afternoon. Don't want you. Have another story. Do you want the body?"

The other was in a woman's hand, and the faint perfume of the first note I had received rose from the sheet. It read:

"I do not understand your silence. The money is ready. What is the matter?"

The officer's note was easy enough to answer. I found paper, and, assuring Detective Coogan of my gratitude at escaping the inquest, I asked him to turn the body over to the undertaker to be buried at my order.

The other note was more perplexing. I could make nothing of it. It was evidently from my unknown employer, and her anxiety was plain to see. But I was no nearer to finding her than before, and if I knew how to reach her I knew not what to say. As I was contemplating this state of affairs with some dejection, and sealing my melancholy note to Detective Coogan, there was a quick step in the hall and a rap at the panel. It was a single person, so I had no hesitation in opening the door, but it gave me a passing satisfaction to have my hand on the revolver in my pocket as I turned the knob.

It was a boy, who thrust a letter into my hand.

"Yer name Wilton?" he inquired, still holding on to the envelope.

"Yes."

"That's yourn, then." And he was prepared to make a bolt.

"Hold on," I said. "Maybe there's an answer."

"No, there ain't. The bloke as gave it to me said there weren't."

"Well, here's something I want you to deliver," said I, taking up my note to Detective Coogan. "Do you know where the City Hall is?"

"Does I know--what are yer givin' us?" said the boy with infinite scorn in his voice.

"A quarter," I returned with a laugh, tossing him the coin. "Wait a minute."

"Yer ain't bad stuff," said the boy with a grin. I tore open the envelope and read on the sheet that came from it:

"Sell everything you bought--never mind the price. Other orders off. D. K."

I gasped with amazement. Had Doddridge Knapp gone mad? To sell twelve thousand five hundred shares of Omega was sure to smash the market, and the half-million dollars that had been put into them would probably shrink by two hundred thousand or more if the order was carried out.

I read the note again.

Then a suspicion large enough to overshadow the universe grew up in my brain. I recalled that Doddridge Knapp had given me a cipher with which he would communicate with me, and I believed, moreover, that he had no idea where I might be at the present moment.

"It's all right, sonny," I said. "Trot along."

"Where's yer letter?" asked the boy, loyally anxious to earn his quarter.

"It won't have to go now," I said coolly. I believed that the boy meant no harm to me, but I was not taking any risks.

The boy sauntered down the hall, singing _My Name Is Hildebrandt Montrose_, and I was left gazing at the letter with a melancholy smile.

"Well, I must look like a sucker if they think I can be taken in by a trick like that," was my mental comment. I charged the scheme up to my snake-eyed friend and had a poorer opinion of his intelligence than I had hitherto entertained. Yet I was astonished that he should, even with the most hearty wish to bring about my downfall, contrive a plan that would inflict a heavy loss on his employer and possibly ruin him altogether. There was more beneath than I could fathom. My brain refused to work in the maze of contradictions and mysteries, plots and counterplots, in which I was involved.

I took my way at last toward the market, and, hailing a boy to whom I intrusted my letter to Detective Coogan, walked briskly to Pine Street.


CHAPTER XI

THE DEN OF THE WOLF

The street had changed its appearance in the two or three hours since I had made my way from the Exchange through the pallid, panic-stricken mob. There were still thousands of people between the corner of Montgomery Street and Leidesdorff, and the little alley itself was packed full of shouting, struggling traders. The thousands were broken into hundreds of groups, and men were noisily buying and selling, or discussing the chances of the market when the "big Board" should open once more. But there was an air of confidence, almost of buoyancy, in place of the gloom and terror that had lowered over the street at noon. Plainly the panic was over, and men were inspirited by a belief that "stocks were going up."

I made a few dispositions accordingly. Taking Doddridge Knapp's hint, I engaged another broker as a relief to Eppner, a short fat man, with the baldest head I ever saw, a black beard and a hook-nose, whose remarkable activity and scattering charges had attracted my attention in the morning session.

Wallbridge was his name, I found, and he proved to be as intelligent as I could wish--a merry little man, with a joke for all things, and a flow of words that was almost overwhelming.

"Omega? Yes," chuckled the stout little broker, after he had assured himself of my financial standing. "But you ought to have bought this morning, if that's what you want. It was hell popping and the roof giving 'way all at once." The little man had an abundant stock of profanity which he used unconsciously and with such original variations that one almost forgot the blasphemy of it while listening to him. "You ought to have been there," he continued, "and watched the boys shell 'em out!"

"Yes, I heard you had lively times."

"Boiling," he said, with coruscating additions in the way of speech and gesture. "If it hadn't been for Decker and some fellow we haven't had a chance to make out yet the bottom of the market would have been resting on the roof of the lower regions." The little man's remark was slightly more direct and forcible, but this will do for a revised version.

"Decker!" I exclaimed, pricking up my ears. "I thought he had quit the market."

As I had never heard of Mr. Decker before that moment this was not exactly the truth, but I thought it would serve me better.

"Decker out of it!" gasped Wallbridge, his bald head positively glistening at the absurdity of the idea. "He'll be out of it when he's carried out."

"I meant out of Omega. Is he getting up a deal?"

The little broker looked vexed, as though it crossed his mind that he had said too much.

"Oh, no. Guess not. Don't think he is," he said rapidly. "Just wanted to save the market, I guess. If Omega had gone five points lower, there would have been the sickest times in the Street that we've seen since the Bank of California closed and the shop across the way,"--pointing his thumb at the Exchange,--"had to be shut up. But maybe it wasn't Decker, you know. That's just what was rumored on the Street, you know."

I suspected that my little broker knew more than he was willing to tell, but I forbore to press him further; and giving him the order to buy all the Omega stock he could pick up under fifty, I made my way to Eppner.

The blue-black eyes of that impassive agent snapped with a glow of interest when I gave him my order to sell the other purchases of the morning and buy Omega, but faded into a dull stare when I lingered for conversation.

I was not to be abashed.

"I wonder who was picking up Omega this morning?" I said.

"Oh, some of the shorts getting ready to fill contracts," he replied in his dry, uninterested tones.

"I heard that Decker was in the market for the stock," I said.

The blue-black eyes gave a flash of genuine surprise.

"Decker!" he exclaimed. Then his eyes fell, and he paused a moment before replying in his high inflexible voice. "He might be."

"Is he after Omega, or is he just bracing up the market?"

"Excuse me," said Eppner with the cold reflection of an apologetic tone, "but we never advise customers. Are you walking over to the Exchange?"

In the Exchange all was excitement, and the first call brought a roar of struggling brokers. I could make nothing of the clamor, but my nearest neighbor shouted in my ear:

"A strong market!"

"It looks that way," I shouted back. It certainly was strong in noise.

I made out at last that prices were being held to the figures of the morning's session, and in some cases were forced above them.

The excitement grew as the call approached Omega. There was an electric tension in the air that told of the anxious hopes and fears that centered in the coming struggle. The stock was called at last, and I looked for a roar that would shake the building and a scene of riot on the floor that would surpass anything I had witnessed yet.

It failed to come. There was almost a pause in the proceedings.

I caught a glimpse of Doddridge Knapp across the room, looking on with a grim smile on the wolf jaws and an apparently impassive interest in the scene. I marveled at his coolness when his fortune, perhaps, turned on the events of the next five minutes. He gave no sign, nor once looked in my direction.

The clamor on the floor began and swelled in volume, and a breath of visible relief passed over the anxious assembly.

Wallbridge and Eppner made a dive at once for a yelling broker, and a cold chill ran down my back. I saw then that I had set my brokers bidding against each other for the same stock.

"Great Mammon!" I thought. "If Doddridge Knapp ever finds it out, what a circus there will be!"

"She's going up!" said my neighbor with a shout of joy. He owned none of the stock, but like the rest of the populace he was a bull on principle.

I nodded with a dubious attempt to imitate his signs of satisfaction.

Forty-five--forty-seven--fifty-five--it was going up by leaps. I blessed the forethought that had suggested to me to put a limit on Wallbridge and stop the competition between my agents at fifty. The contest grew warmer. I could follow with difficulty the course of the proceedings, but I knew that Omega was bounding upward.

The call closed amid animation; but the excitement was nothing compared to the scene that had followed the fall in the morning. Omega stood at eighty asked, and seventy-eight bid, and the ship of the stock gamblers was again sailing on an even keel. Some hundreds had been washed overboard, but there were thousands left, and nobody foresaw the day when the market would take the fashion of a storm-swept hulk, with only a chance survivor clinging here and there to the wreckage and exchanging tales of the magnificence that once existed.

The session was over at last, and Wallbridge and Eppner handed me their memoranda of purchases.

"You couldn't pick Omega off the bushes this afternoon, Mr. Wilton," said Wallbridge, wiping his bald head vigorously. "There's fools at all times, and some of 'em were here and ready to drop what they had; but not many. I gathered in six hundred