Saint Intervenes Read Online Free PDF

much on the knowledge
of any actual fraud as on the fact that the small investments which
represented the life savings had on occasion been skittled down the market
in the course of Mr. Oates’s important operations, which every
right-think ing person will agree was a very unsporting and
un-British attitude to take.
    The
elementary principles of share manipulation are, of course, simplicity
itself. If large blocks of a certain share are thrown on the market
from various quarters, the word goes r ound that the stock is bad, the small
investor takes fright and dashes in to cut his losses, thereby making
matters worse, and the price of the share falls according to the first law of
supply and demand. If, on the other hand, there is heavy buying in a certain
share, the word goes round that it is a “good thing,” the small
speculator jumps in for a quick profit, adding his weight to the
snowball, and the price goes up according to the same law. This is the foundation system on
which all specu lative operators work; but
Mr. Oates had his own ways of accelerating these reactions.
    “Nobody can say that Titus
Oates ain’t an honest man,” he used to say to the very exclusive circle of
confederates who shared his confidence and
a reasonable proportion of his prof its.
“P’raps I am a bit smarter than some of the others, but that’s their
funeral. You don’t know what tricks they get up to behind the scenes, but nobody knows what tricks I get up to, either. It’s all in the day’s work.”
    He was
thinking along the same lines on a certain morn ing, while he waited for his associates to
arrive for the con ference at which the
final details of the manoeuvre on which he was working at that time would be decided. It was the biggest manipulation he had attempted so far, and
it involved a trick that sailed much
closer to the wind than anything he had
done before; but it has already been explained that he was not a man who did things by halves. The
economic de pression which had
bogged down the market for many months past,
and the resultant steadfast refusal of stocks to soar ap preciably however stimulated by legitimate and
near-legitimate means, had been very bad for his business as well as
others. Now, envisaging the first symptoms
of an upturn, he was pre paring to
cash in on it to an extent that would compensate for many months of failure;
and with so much lost ground to make
up he had no time for half measures. Yet he knew that there were a few tense days ahead of him.
    A discreet knock on his door,
heralding the end of thought and the
beginning of action, was almost a relief. His new secretary entered in answer to his curt summons,
and his eyes rested on her slim
figure for a moment with unalloyed pleasure—she
was a remarkably beautiful girl with natural honey-golden hair and entrancing blue eyes which in Mr. Oates’s dreams had sometimes been known to gaze
with Dietrichesque yearning upon his unattractive person.
    “Mr.
Hammel and Mr. Costello are here,” she said.
    Mr. Oates
nodded.
    “Bring
them in, mydear.” He rummaged thoughtfully through
his pockets and produced a crumpled five-pound note, which he pushed
towards her. “And buy yourself some silk stockings when you go
out to lunch—just as a little gift from me. You’ve been a
good gal. Some night next week, when I’m not working so hard, we might have
dinner together, eh?”
    “Thank
you, Mr. Oates,” she said softly, and left him with a sweet
smile which started strange wrigglings within him.
    When they
had dinner together he would make her call him Titus, he
thought, and rubbed his hands over the romantic prospect. But before
that happy night he had much to do; and the entrance of
Hammel and Costello brought him back to the stern
consideration of how that dinner and many others, with silk stockings and
orchids to match, were to be paid for.
    Mr. Jules
Hammel was a small rotund gentleman whose rimless spectacles
gave him a benign and owlish