Even the banks use
their deposits for trading. Didn't old ---- dump a lot of rotten stuff
on you? Why don't you get even? Let me tell you something. Fully
one-half of the men who are now successful financiers got their start by
putting up as margin securities deposited with them. No one ever knew
the difference, and now they are on their feet. If you took two bonds
overnight you might put them back in the morning. Every one does it.
It's part of the game."
"But suppose we lost?" asked John.
"You can't," said Prescott. "Cotton is sure to go up. It's throwing away
the chance of your life."
John said he couldn't do such a thing, but when he returned to the
office the cashier told him that a merger had been planned between their
company and another--a larger one. John knew what that meant well
enough--half the clerks would lose their positions. He was getting
thirty-five dollars a week, had married a young wife, and, as he had
told the magnate, he "needed it all." That night as he put the
securities from the "loan cage" back in the vault the bonds burned his
fingers. They were lying around loose, no good to anybody, and only two
of them, overnight maybe, would make him independent of salaries and
mergers--a free man and his own master.
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