Inside of ten minutes it was all over the Waldorf and on the wires, "Look out for Lawson! He's trying to get Amalgamated at 110." And by the time I got to the Holland, a block down the Avenue, the brokers and investors gathered there were ready to give me the laugh with "You're out early, we see, to pick up a bundle of easy money."
My first task had been accomplished to my own satisfaction. Inside of an hour it would be flashed over the world that there was a firm reliable market at 110 bid and almost any price asked for Amalgamated, and while 110 was not anything like the wild 140 to 160 that rumor gossiped of, it represented such a good profit that it was sure to set the market off with an all-round chipperness.
My readers must bear in mind that as yet there was no real Amalgamated stock which could be sold, and no place to sell it if there had been, for until each subscriber received official notice no one really knew for certain that he had been allotted any stock, and until the Amalgamated shares were listed on the Stock Exchange, there could be no reliable market, although they could be traded in on the curb.
At the Holland House, I quickly outlined to my chief brokers my plans for the day. Then together we started for Wall Street.
The hours that followed were busy ones, and confusing as well. Wall Street was a-buzz with curiosity and from all sides poured questions. "The Street," it was evident, had awakened to the fact that the situation in Amalgamated disclosed a different line-up of conditions from that which it had anticipated. As to whether the change was good or bad no one dared hazard a guess. For the first time in my experience, Wall Street was completely at sea. The shrewdest plungers and manipulators, men to whom the tape yields up its secrets as the penitent to the priest; to whom the ticker babbles the inner mysteries of directors' meetings and deep-down deals—these men whose eyes, ears, and noses decades of stock-play