Mr. Prindivale, striving to make his tone normal, “about the Monotrack stock which I sold you—er—I have been thinking it over and I realize that it was—er—entirely upon your faith in my advice that you purchased it. I—I could not, in all—er—fairness, expect you to pay for the burden of my—ah—sincere but mistaken judgment, so I have decided to take the stock off your hands without a cent of loss to you and pocket it myself.”
“Oh, Mr. Prindivale! How lovely of you!” exclaimed Mrs. Cartwright, who had been carefully tutored by her cousin’s husband, Mr. Clackworthy, for this identical situation.
“Yes,” went on Mr. Prindivale, “so I will be right out and give you a check.”
“Oh, there is no hurry, Mr. Prindivale, so long as you promise.”
“But there is a hur—I mean that I am in a hurry to get it off my mind. I know you will feel better with things fixed up; I—Well, I might die tonight, you know. There has been no one out to see you about buying the stock, I suppose?”
“Oh, no; who would want to buy it?”
“Oh, of course not; of course not,” assented the banker, “but—um—in case some one did talk to you about it, I would advise you to do nothing until you talk to me.”
“Oh, Mr. Prindivale!” gurgled Mrs. Cartwright. “You are so excited and everything; I do believe that the stock is going up.”
The banker swore under his breath; he was walking on dangerously thin ice.
“Certainly not; that was just—just a little joke,” he amended.
A taxicab driver, bribed with a twenty-dollar bill, broke all the speed records in getting Mr. Prindivale out to the suburb. The banker found Mrs. Cartwright in the sitting room of her modest little home, evidently waiting for him; she had the stock certificates in her hand.
“I’ll just write a check, Mrs. Cartwright,” he said with hardly the ceremony of a greeting.
“Why, Mr. Prindivale!” the widow exclaimed. “You act so excited. I do believe that something has happened to the Monotrack business.”
Mentally the banker reviled woman for her intuitive powers, as he wrote his check.
“Here you are,” he said, unable to keep the eagerness from his voice; “I will take the stock back now—you see I have not allowed you to lose a cent.”
Mrs. Cartwright tilted her chin and firmly put her hand which held the certificates behind her back.
“I’ve got—what do you men call it—a hunch?” she said. “I have decided not to sell for thirty dollars a share!”
Mr. Prindivale tried a bluff; with an anger which was not entirely assumed, he snapped his check book shut and pocketed his pen.
“Just as you will,” he said coldly; “I try to play good Samaritan and am at once suspected of some underhand scheme to cheat you.”
“I—I am sorry if I have misjudged you,” she returned with a show of penitence. “Of course, if you are sincere in your offer, I suppose—” She paused in sudden thought. “But I can’t get rid of that—that hunch; something seems to tell that I should not sell my stock for thirty dollars a share.”
“And I presume,” said Mr. Prindivale with a poorly concealed sarcasm, “that your hunch also tells you just what price you will get.”
“Now, let’s see!” she cried, like a child playing a game and clapping her hands in fun. “Now, isn’t that funny—a figure just pops in my mind—eighty dollars a share!”
“Come, Mrs. Cartwright,” purred Mr. Prindivale in his most persuasive tone, “I’ll tell you what I will do. Since I have caused you quite a little worry over your apparent loss of sixty thousand dollars, I will permit you to make a little profit—out of my own pocket, you know—as a sort of penalty for my mistaken judgment in advising you. I will give you thirty-five dollars a share.”
Mrs. Cartwright laughed, and how was Mr. Prindivale to know that this was the cue for Mrs. Cartwright’s loyal and trusted servant, Amelia, to connect the electric current which caused a telephone bell to ring in another room? The banker was engulfed by apprehension, that might be J. K.’s men seeking to get in touch with her; he was, somehow, almost sure that it was.
“As—as I was saying”—he stumbled.
“Mis’ Cartwright; there’s a man on the phone as wants to talk to you,” said Amelia; “he says his name’s Clack—Clack something.”
“Just a minute, Mr. Prindivale; you will excuse me for a moment.”
“Wait! Wait!” cried Mr. Prindivale wildly. “Let us close this up before you go; now let me see—” He was hastily doing a little problem in mental arithmetic; Clackworthy had promised to pay the par value of one hundred dollars per share, that would be an even two hundred thousand dollars. If he paid Mrs. Cartwright eighty dollars a share that would total one hundred and sixty thousand dollars, and as hard as the bargain was, a forty-thousand-dollar profit as compared with the clean-up of a cool one hundred and forty thousand dollars that he had visioned was, after all, a good killing.
“You said that you would take eighty dollars a share,” pursued the banker.
“Oh, but I was just joking—really; surely you—”
“You gave me your word, your promise, that you would take eighty dollars a share,” insisted Mr. Prindivale. “You can’t back out now; you must let me have it—you must!”
Feverishly he again wrote in his check book; he forced the slip of paper into Mrs. Cartwright’s fingers and almost forcibly tore the stock certificates from her hand. The widow was apparently too bewildered to protest. And before she could find voice, Mr. Prindivale dashed out of the house. He would have been a much surprised and mystified man if he could have seen her rush to the telephone and call a city number and to have heard her words:
“Amos Clackworthy, you darling, darling man! We have met the enemy and his check is ours. I’m going to rush right out, just like you told me, and have it certified—then I will be right down and give you your hundred thousand dollar collection fee. Isn’t it great to have a cousin who has a husband with such a wonderful brain!”
VIII.
And that would end the story, except for Mr. Prindivale being what is sometimes sneeringly referred to as “a rotten loser.”
When the suburban banker trotted triumphantly up to the Great Lakes Building the following day, two thousand shares of Monotrack Transit in his pocket, he was amazed to find the offices of the Atlas Investment Company vacant. It gradually dawned upon him that something was wrong. In his first burst of rage he visited the district attorney’s office and laid bare the amazing story.
The district attorney, viewing the case from all angles, decided that perhaps morally Mr. Cyrus Prindivale had been most thoroughly bunkoed, but that legally he had merely made an unfortunate investment. The district attorney, too, in delving deep into the details, had uncovered the fact that the worthless stock Mr. Prindivale had purchased from Mrs. Cartwright for one hundred and sixty thousand dollars was the same identical and equally worthless stock that he had sold to her for just one hundred thousand
