“Wall Street heard yesterday that Superintendent H——­ got his first information concerning the state in which X——­’s affairs were from quarters where resentment may have been cherished because of his activity in the Long Island Traction field.  This is one of the Street’s ‘clover patches’ and the success which the newcomer seemed to be meeting did not provoke great pleasure.”

Another item read: 

“A hitch in a deal that was to have transferred the South Shore to the New York and Queens County System, owned by the Long Island Railroad, at a profit of almost $2,000,000 to X——­, was the cause of all the trouble.  Very active displeasure on the part of certain powers in Wall Street blocked, it is said, the closing of the deal for the railroad.  They did not want him in this field, and were powerful enough to prevent it.  At the same time pressure from other directions was brought to bear on him.  The clearing-house refused to clear for his banks.  X——­ was in need of cash, but still insisting on a high rate of remuneration for the road which he had developed to an important point.  Their sinister influences entered and blocked the transfer until it was no longer possible for him to hold out.”

Along with these two items was a vast mass of data, really pages, showing how, when, where he had done thus and so, “juggled accounts” between one bank and another, all of which he controlled however, and most of which he owned, drew out large sums and put in their place mortgages on, or securities in, new companies which he was organizing—­tricks which were the ordinary routine of Wall Street and hence rather ridiculous as the sub-stone of so vast a hue and cry.

I was puzzled and, more than that, moved by the drama of the man’s sudden end, for I understood a little of finance and its ways, also of what place and power had plainly come to mean to him.  It must be dreadful.  Yet how could it be, I asked myself, if he really owned fifty-one per cent or more in so many companies that he could be such a dark villain?  After all, ownership is ownership, and control, control.  On the face of the reports themselves his schemes did not look so black.  I read everything in connection with him with care.

As the days passed various other things happened.  For one thing, he tried to commit suicide by jumping out of a window of his studio in New York; for another, he tried to take poison.  Now of a sudden a bachelor sister, of whom I had never heard in all the time I had known him, put in an appearance as his nearest of kin—­a woman whose name was not his own but a variation of it, an “-ovitch” having suddenly been tacked onto it.  She took him to a sanitarium, from which he was eventually turned out as a criminal, then to a hospital, until finally he surrendered himself to the police.  The names of great lawyers and other bankers began to enter the case.  Alienists of repute, those fine chameleons