Saint Intervenes Read Online Free PDF Page B

appearance, like somebody’s very
juvenile uncle. Mr. Abe Costello was longer and much more cadaverous, and he wore
a pencil-line of hair across his upper lip with a certain undercurrent
of self-consciousness which might have made one think that he went about
in the constant embarrassing fear of being mistaken for Clark Gable.
Actually their resemblance to any such harmless characters
was illusory—they were nearly as cunning as Mr. Oates himself,
and not even a trifle less unscrupulous.
    “Well,
boys,” said Mr. Oates, breaking the ice jovially, “I found
another good thing last night.”
    “Buy
or sell?” asked Costello alertly.
    “Buy,”
said Mr. Oates. “I bought it. As far as I can find out, there
are only about a dozen in the world. The issue was corrected the day
after it came out.”
    Hammel
helped himself to a cigar and frowned puzzledly.
    “What
is this?”
    “A
German 5-pfenning with the Befreiungstag overprint inverted
and spelt with a P instead of a B,” explained Mr. Oates. “That’s a
stamp you could get a hundred pounds for any day.”
    His guests
exchanged tolerant glances. While they lighted their Partagas they
allowed Mr. Oates to expatiate on the beauties of his acquisition with all
the extravagant zeal of the rabid collector; but as soon as the smokes
were going Costello recalled the meeting to its agenda.
    “Well,”
he said casually, “Midorients are down to 25.”
    “24,”
said Mr. Oates. “I rang up my brokers just before you came in and told
them to sell another block. They’ll be down to 23 or 22 after
lunch. We’ve shifted them pretty well.”
    “When
do we start buying?” asked Hammel.
    “At
22. And you’ll have to do it quickly. The wires are being sent off at
lunch-time tomorrow, and the news will be in the papers before the
Exchange closes.”
    Mr. Oates
paced the floor steadily, marshalling the facts of the situation for an
audience which was already conversant with them.
    The
Midorient Company owned large and unproductive con cessions in
Mesopotamia. Many years ago its fields had flowed with seemingly
inexhaustible quantities of oil of excellent quality, and the
stock had paid its original holders several thousand times over. But suddenly,
on account of those ab struse and unpredictable geological causes to
which such things are subject, the supply had petered out. Frenzied boring
had failed to produce results. The output had dropped to a paltry few hundred
barrels which sufficed to pay dividends of two per cent on the
stock—no more, and, as a slight tempering of the wind to the shorn
stockholders, no less. The shares had adjusted their market value
accordingly. Boring had con tinued ever since, without showing any
improvement; and indeed the shares had depreciated still further during the
past fortnight as a result of persistent rumours that even the small output
which had for a long while saved the stock from be coming entirely
derelict was drying up—rumours which, as omniscient chroniclers
of these events, we are able to trace back to the ingenious agency of Mr.
Titus Oates.
    That was
sufficient to send the moribund stock down to the price at which Messrs.
Oates, Costello, and Hammel desired to buy it. The boom on which they would
make their profit called for more organisation, and involved the slight decep tion on
which Mr. Oates was basing his gamble.
    Travelling
in Mesopotamia at that moment there was an English tourist named
Ischolskov, and it is a matter of impor tance that he was
there entirely at Mr. Oates’s instigation and expense. During his
visit he had contrived to learn the names of the correspondents
of the important newspaper and news agencies in that region, and at the
appointed time it would be his duty to send off similarly worded
cablegrams, signed with the names of these correspondents, which
would report to London that the Midorient Company’s engineers had struck oil
again—had, in fact, tapped a gigantic gusher of petroleum that