after that mary harrison—such was her name—was soon installed in a pretty little flat up in harlem; and robbie, a happy and guileless boy once more, was to be found there not infrequently. we must content ourselves with this brief mention of the subject, and hurry back with our hero to the tedious affairs of wall street.
for events moved swiftly in that part of the town; and even before the kalamazoo airship corner had been settled robert van rensselaer was busily planning the great coup of his life,—the smashing of transatlantic and suburban. about that desperate and historical campaign it is necessary that the reader should be told in detail.
there are men in wall street, gamblers pure and simple, who will bull or bear any stock out of which they think they can get[79] anything; and again there are also legitimate manipulators. a legitimate manipulator of stocks, in the view of robert van rensselaer, was a man who studied the financial and economic conditions of the world, and aimed to drive prices where they ought to go. if a man could see deeply enough, and bear only unsound stocks and over-produced commodities, he might be considered as a useful servant of society—and what would be no less pleasant, the eternal laws of the universe would work with him in all his trading.
the story of the great transatlantic and suburban railroad battle—the most sanguinary of all the conflicts of our hero, and one which wall street men will never forget while they live—the reader may find narrated in jabbergrab, p. 1906, as follows:—
"it was the same marvellous grasp of conditions and of deep movements, men say. van rensselaer had been watching t. & s. for over a year, and watching the people who were engineering it. he[80] had studied every phase of the problem and in the end he pricked a bubble that was shedding a rainbow effulgence upon mankind, and that had deceived some of the keenest financiers of the country.
"in the first place robert van rensselaer had distrusted the t. & s. people, knowing some inside facts about them. then he had studied the future of the line, its management, its plans, its huge issues of stock, which men whispered must be watered even while they bought it up like mad; and then from certain secret information about conferences, of which no one was supposed to know, from certain suspicious movements in the market as well, van rensselaer became sure that the t. & s. financiers were prepared for a great boom in the stock. he was perfectly willing,—he helped them along,—for the more they inflated it, the better could he manage what he meant to do. only when he thought they were about exhausted, he turned to the other side; and so began the battle of the giants."
