We bankers: Tom was so proud of being a banker. He worshipped Morgan—even had a roll-top desk like his hero. But you couldn’t blame him. And if the bankers were taking the moral high ground and telling everyone how to behave, you couldn’t deny that they had a point.

The fact was, Frank thought, when you looked back over the last few decades, for most of his own lifetime really, the New York Stock Exchange had hardly been a respectable place. If the railroad show had been a big attraction, the stock market had been the fairground. You could get away with almost anything.

The easiest ploy was to control a company. Men like Jay Gould would cheerfully issue new stock without even telling existing shareholders, taking new money from new shareholders while diluting the stock values of the old ones. Watering the stock, they called it. You could set up new companies to buy the old ones until nobody knew what the hell they had. You could buy politicians to vote for concessions that would favor your business, and give them shares for doing it. Above all, you could manipulate the price of the stock of your own company, and then speculate in its shares.

But solid men like Morgan were insisting on new rules, now. The market was being cleaned up—slowly.

“The thing that’s most frowned upon at the moment,” said Tom, “is companies manipulating their own stock. For instance, a company offers to sell you a parcel of its stock at a discounted price. Then, by whatever manipulations, the company deliberately makes its own stock seem worthless. So it can satisfy your order by buying its own stock at a rock-bottom price. A week later, the artificial panic’s over, and the company’s made an extra profit. Some companies have done that sort of thing again and again. And of course, when brokers start placing bets on stock-price movements, they can get badly burned by these games. Gabriel Love is one of the great offenders. Do you know him?”

“Know the name,” said Frank Master, cautiously.

“He belongs in jail,” said Tom firmly. “But your railroad operation doesn’t sound like that. Effectively, you’d have cornered the market in the shares, and you may profit accordingly. So long as there’s nothing else going on.”

“So you think it’s all right?”

“I’d be happy to handle the business for you, if you like.”

“That’s kind of you, Tom, but I think I can take care of it.”

“As you wish. If you get wind of anything that might be improper, you’ve a very simple option, you know. Just hold on to your shares. Don’t sell them, or at least wait a while, till the whole thing’s blown over. The stock may stay at the higher price, and you could lighten your holding then, and take some profit. That’d be all right.”

“Thank you, Tom.”

“My pleasure. You don’t want to tell me what this railroad is?”

“Not just now.”