Samuel the Seeker | Page 4

if I was to buy a horse because I knowed that horses would be scarce next spring. It's just business."
"But those factories make beer bottles and whisky bottles!" exclaimed the old man. "Does it seem right to you to get our money that way?"
"They make all kinds of bottles," said Adam; "how can they help what they're used for?"
"And besides," put in Dan, with a master-stroke of diplomacy, "it will raise the prices on 'em, and make 'em harder to git."
"There's been fortunes lost in Wall Street," said the father. "How can we tell?"
"We've got a chance to get in on the inside," said Adam. "Such chances don't happen twice in a lifetime."
"Just read this here circular!" added Dan. "If we let a chance like this go we'll deserve to break our backs hoeing corn the rest of our days."
That was the argument. Old Ephraim had never thought of a broken back in connection with the hoeing of corn. There were four acres in the field, and every spring he had plowed and harrowed it and planted it and replanted what the crows had pulled up; and all summer long he had hoed and tended it, and in the fall he had cut it, stalk by stalk, and stacked it; and then through October, sitting on the bare bleak hillside, he had husked it, ear by ear, and gathered it in baskets--if the season was good, perhaps a hundred dollars' worth of grain. That was the way one worked to create a hundred dollars' worth of Value; and Manning had paid as much for the fancy-mounted shotgun which stood in the corner of his room! And here was the great fourteen-million- dollar Glass Bottle Trust, with properties said to be worth twenty- five million, and the control of one of the great industries of the country--and stock which might easily go to a hundred and fifty in a single week!
"Boys," said the old man, sadly, "it won't be me that will spend this money. And I don't want to stand in your way. If you're bent on doing it--"
"We are!" cried Adam.
"What do you say, Samuel?" asked the father.
"I don't know what to say," said Samuel. "It seems to me that three thousand dollars is a lot of money. And I don't see why we need any more."
"Do you want to stand in the way?" demanded Adam.
"No, I don't want to stand in the way," said Samuel.
And so the decision was made. When they came to give the order they found themselves confronted with a strange proposition; they did not have to buy the whole stock, it seemed--they might buy only the increase in its value. And the effect of this marvelous device would be that they would make ten times as much as they had expected to make! So, needless to say, they bought that way.
And they took a daily paper and watched breathlessly, while "Glass Bottle Securities" crept up from sixty-three and an eighth to sixty- four and a quarter. And then, late one evening, old Hiram Johns, the storekeeper, drove up with a telegram from Manning and Isaacson, telling them that they must put up more "margin"--"Glass Bottle Securities" was at fifty-six and five eighths. They sat up all night debating what this could mean and trying to lay the specters of horror. The next day Adam set out to go to the city and see about it; but he met the mail on the way and came home again with a letter from the brokers, regretfully informing them that it had been necessary to sell the stock, which was now below fifty. In the news columns of the paper they found the explanation of the calamity--old Henry Lockman had dropped dead of apoplexy at the climax of his career, and the bears had played havoc with "Glass Bottle Securities."
Their three thousand dollars was gone. It took them three days to realize it--it was so utterly beyond belief, that they had to write to the brokers and receive another letter in which it was stated in black and white and beyond all misunderstanding that there was not a dollar of their money left. Adam raged and swore like a madman, and Dan vowed savagely that he would go down to the city and kill Manning. As for the father, he wrote a letter of agonized reproach, to which Mr. Manning replied with patient courtesy, explaining that he had had nothing to do with the matter; that he was a broker and had bought as ordered, and that he had been powerless to foresee the death of Lockman. "You will remember," he said, "that I warned you of the uncertainties of the market, and of the chances that you took." Ephraim did not remember anything of the sort,