BY WILLIAM A. JOHNSTON

“MUST be something doing,” said the night-clerk to the room-clerk, nodding in the direction of a middle-aged man who was being piloted toward the elevator by a bell-boy. “That’s Martin, the banker, going up to see the Senator. There’s three others ahead of him. The Senator was expecting them, too, for he told me when they came in to have them shown up to his sitting-room at once.”

“Who are the others?” asked the room-clerk, raising his eyes from his ledger to look after the departing form of the man who—next to Russell Sage—was reputed to have command of the largest amount of ready money of any man in the United States.

“Well,” replied the night-clerk, taking advantage of the dulness of a rainy night in the spring to engage in more extended conversation than the exigencies of his calling usually permitted, “the first one to arrive was Congressman Woods. He’s stopping over at the Waldorf. This is only his second term in the House, but they say he is practically leader of his party. Not ten minutes after him was Higgins, who used to be comptroller, or something of the sort. He’s made a pile of money in the Street in the last few years. They say that last corner in wheat netted him about two million. I wouldn’t care if I stood close enough to him to get a tip once in awhile on the way things were going. There would be more in it than following the horses, although that ain’t saying much, judging by the run of bad luck I have had lately. Just before Martin came in Tom Connors went upstairs.”

“Tom’s rather out of his latitude, ain’t he?” said the room-clerk. “It ain’t often he gets in with such big fellows, is it?”

“Don’t you fool yourself,” replied the night-clerk. “Maybe Tom Connors doesn’t get his name in the society news as often as the rest of them, but all the same he stands about as near next the Senator as anyone in town. Tom Connors has a big pull in Washington, and almost as big a one with the bankers here. With the chances he has the only reason Tom Connors ain’t a millionaire is because he’s such a spender. Tom is a working partner in a good many Senate deals or steals, whichever you want to call them, unless I’m much mistaken.”

The arrival of several guests put an end to the conversation. The room-clerk turned once more to his ledger and the night-clerk began reaching for keys and yelling, “Front!” An hour or two later the men behind the desk were at leisure again when “Ed” Wallace strolled up. To him the night-clerk imparted the information that the Senator was having some sort of a sÉance in his rooms, incidentally mentioning who were there.

Wallace hastened over to the corner where several members of that unorganized organization, “the political combination,” the brightest reporters of the big newspapers, were exchanging reminiscences. “The most news with the least work” is the motto of the “combination.” It means that whatever news one of them gets, all get—with considerably less labor than if each worked independently, and with the chance of a rival newspaper scoring a “beat” reduced to the minimum.

Various theories as to the meaning of the conference upstairs were suggested and rejected. The five men in the Senator’s rooms were not political allies—that the reporters well knew. That they were all, with the exception perhaps of the Western representative, warm personal friends, they knew equally well. But despite its knowledge of the men and its familiarity with the political situation, the “combination” was unable to deduce anything that could be printed.

“I’ll give it up,” said Stanley Titus. “The only thing I see is for Wallace to go upstairs and see what is going on. The Senator will talk to him if he’ll talk to anyone, and perhaps we can get a line on what’s doing.”

When Wallace, two minutes later, knocked on the door of the Senator’s sitting-room, it was the Senator himself who opened it—just about two inches—and peered impatiently into the hall.

“Oh, it’s you, is it, Wallace?” he said. “Well, my boy, what can I do for you?”

“The combination would like to know if you have anything to say for publication about the conference that is going on in there,” replied Wallace.

The Senator put his head a little farther out the door. “I will tell you something, but you will understand that it is not for publication,” he said, dropping his voice to a whisper as Wallace leaned forward expectantly. “I’ve got all the blues.” And the door was shut in Wallace’s face.

But there were no chips or cards on the table to which the Senator returned after shutting the door. The five men, their wrinkled brows betokening hard thinking, were intently studying neatly tabulated statements—long rows of figures—that might mean much or little, depending entirely on the observer’s information as to their purpose.

“As I was saying,” the Senator began, taking up the conversation where he had dropped it to answer the knock, “I am fully convinced that $10,000,000 will see it through. Out of that the expenses of engineering the deal will amount to, say, a million. The actual expenses of collection should not exceed more than ten per cent., and I believe with Mr. Connors that a good part of it can be done with five per cent. That million is all we stand to lose, for the rest will be invested in goods worth their face value, whether the plan succeeds or fails. I believe that it will succeed and I am ready to guarantee one-fourth of the sum needed. If each of the others present, with the exception of Mr. Connors, will do the same, we will have the money. As Mr. Connors is the originator of the plan and will have to superintend the carrying out of the details, I think that without being expected to invest any money he should receive one-tenth of the net profits, and the residue can be divided equally among the rest of us.”

There were no dissenters to the Senator’s proposition, least of all Tom Connors. After some little discussion as to details, the date for carrying out the plan was fixed as the first Friday in October, or rather the first Friday and Saturday, as it was calculated that two days would be required to consummate the work.

When the conference adjourned an hour later Mr. Higgins, the former comptroller, Representative Woods and the Senator each had agreed to have by the first day of September $2,500,000 in available cash, which Mr. Martin, the banker, joining with $2,500,000 of his own, could utilize in carrying out the scheme proposed by Tom Connors, who in lieu of capital had pledged himself to an immense amount of hard work, in consideration of which he was to receive one-tenth of the profits.

There was no good reason for calling it the Fractional Currency Bill, for in reality it was an anti-fractional currency bill. It provided that after the fifteenth day of September the Government of the United States should not issue or cause to be issued, or coin or cause to be coined, any half-dollars, quarters, dimes, nickels, two-cent pieces or pennies, and also that none of the fractional currency already in existence in the possession of the United States should be put into circulation for a period of five years after the date on which the law became operative.

The bill made its appearance in the House and Senate a few days after the opening of the special session called by the President to meet on the twelfth day of July. Strange to say, neither the Senator nor Representative Woods seemed to be much interested in it. Both voted for it after having made brief speeches in its support, but they were only two of many that did the same. The father of the bill in the House was Hicks, of California, and in his State the measure was known as the Hicks bill. The patron of the measure in the Senate was Gordon, of Maine. Neither of these men heretofore had been recognized as having much influence with their associates, but in this instance their pet bill at once found favor in the eyes of their colleagues.

It is a peculiar thing about the American law-maker—the real author of legislation—that he seldom, if ever, appears at the front. He is content that some of the small fry shall have the distinction of fathering the laws and be recorded in history as the men who did this or that for their country’s good. The real leaders of American political life and actions seem to think that post-mortem fame is more than outweighed by more substantial ante-mortem things.

Simple as the measure seemed to read, so equally simple were the strongest arguments used in its support. The actual metal in a penny was worth perhaps the tenth of a penny. There was a startling difference between the face value and the bullion value of the nickel. Even the silver coins if offered as metal in the open market would fetch less than half the amount that they called for. Eventually, if more and more of these “tokens of value” were issued, the people would refuse to accept them except far below par. The time to stop such depreciation was before it had begun, the supporters of the measure in both houses declared, and there was none to gainsay them. Those who had always opposed the greenback theory could not consistently oppose this line of reasoning. So the bill in its transition into law met little opposition.

Strange to say, the newspapers, not even the tragedy-shrieking, sensation-making, scandal-hunting ones, saw aught in the Fractional Currency Bill to make it worth more than a casual mention. What was said about it was good. One or two of the Far West publications who had viewed with dismay the gradually increasing number of pennies in their vicinity, welcomed it openly and gladly, for they felt that it would avert the possibility of reducing their prices to the one, two or three cent standard of the East. The Eastern newspapers that had been cutting each other’s throats by selling twelve and sixteen pages of printed matter at less than the cost of the white paper itself, saw in the measure, if as predicted it resulted in the gradual withdrawal of the penny from circulation, a chance to demand and receive a higher price for their issues without being hurt by the lower prices of rivals. Naturally, the newspapers did not oppose the measure.

As for the people—what do the American people, individually, know or care what is done in Washington? For the most part the knowledge of the community at large is confined to what it reads of the doings of Congress in the Washington letters and to the criticisms it sees in its pet editorial columns. If nothing is said about a particular bill, the public knows nothing. Merchants, bankers, shipping interests, railroads, labor unions, are aroused to action only when they see in a bill an attempt to work injury to themselves. In the case of the Fractional Currency Bill those who knew of it saw nothing in it likely to injure them, and so there was no opposition.

Thus it was that the bill prohibiting the issue of the fractional currency of the United States for a period of five years from the fifteenth day of September received the signature of the President and was duly recorded among the laws of the nation.

Seven o’clock in the morning of the first Friday in October found Tom Connors at his desk in his offices on the second floor of the Safe Deposit Building. He had rented a suite of rooms there several months before and had put on the door the simple sign, “Thomas E. Connors, Broker.” There was nothing unusual about the appearance of the office. In the anteroom there were a few chairs, a table and an office-boy. In another room a leased wire was run in and a telegraph operator was seated. In the office of the “broker” himself there were only such paraphernalia as might be found in any broker’s office.

Even in an inner room there was hardly anything to arouse suspicion. Some persons might have wondered a little if they had noticed that what was to all appearances a door of a coat-closet in reality opened on a secret staircase that led directly to the floor below and into one of the strong rooms of the Safe Deposit Company of which Mr. Martin, the banker, was president.

It was not very many minutes after the arrival of his employer that the office-boy realized to his regret that Friday was to be almost as busy a day for him as the day before had been. Ordinarily, he had had plenty of time to read his favorite literature, interrupted perhaps by a dozen callers and half a dozen errands to do, but on Thursday he had observed sorrowfully that Mr. Connors’s clients seemed to be increasing. If he had kept count he might have known that no less and no more than one hundred persons had called on Mr. Connors. Mr. Connors saw all of them. Some of them he saw alone. Others were admitted to his room by twos and threes. In one instance ten men entered the inner office and emerged from it twenty minutes later in a body. But what all those men were doing there was not of half so much interest to the office-boy as was the fate of Daredevil Mike, whom the end of the chapter had left facing the muzzles of seven rifles in the hands of seven desperate moonshiners.

Perhaps the office-boy’s respect for Mr. Connors’s callers would have been increased had he known that each of the men when he left the office had a package of one-dollar bills. There was not one of them that had not at least $100; others had as much as $500. There was not one of them that Mr. Connors did not know was to be trusted thoroughly. The men were carefully selected. Some of them on previous occasions during political campaigns had been supplied with money by Mr. Connors to be distributed in the places where it would do the most good. A few of them were not unknown in the records of crime, but as Mr. Connors had remarked to Martin, the banker, to whom he had shown the list, “There ain’t one of them that would throw down a friend.”

One of these men had arrived in the office shortly after Mr. Connors, and as soon as he was admitted to the private office and the door had been shut, he exclaimed:

“Say, Connors, that was a regular cinch. It did not take me more than an hour to clean up that market. No explanations had to be made, either.”

“Where’s the stuff?” asked Mr. Connors bruskly, and Mullins, his caller, began emptying on the desk from every pocket in his clothing a varied assortment of small change.

“You’ll find there’s ninety-five dollars there all right, as per agreement,” said Mullins. “I didn’t have to spend much over a dollar, either. It was a package of tobacco here and some potatoes for the old woman there, where some old codger wouldn’t give me change unless I bought something. But in most cases I would go to a stall and tell them a neighbor wanted five dollars in small change till the bank opened, and nearly every time I would get it. I don’t believe there’s a hundred pennies left in that market.”

While he had been talking a clerk from the Safe Deposit Company had entered Mr. Connors’s office by the private staircase. He carried to the room below the money Mullins had turned in, returning shortly with two receipt slips, one of which went to Mr. Connors and the other to his caller.

“Now, Mullins,” said Mr. Connors, “I want you to go up to the big cable-car barn where the conductors turn in their money. Here’s $500 more, and stay there until you are relieved. If you run out of money telephone me. Get in some inconspicuous corner and pass the word around among the conductors that ninety-five pennies or nineteen nickels are worth a dollar to you. If they want to know what is up tell them that it is a theatrical advertising dodge; tell them that you are writing a story for a Sunday newspaper—tell them anything.”

Hardly had Mullins been dismissed when another of the syndicate’s agents came in to report and was hurried off to some other part of the city. In some cases the men received an allowance of five per cent. on all the money they handled. In other cases it was a little more. So the work went on all that day and the next. Ten men were kept at work in ten sections of the city seeing that paper money replaced the silver, nickels and coppers in the tills of the small shops. Few, if any, of the shopkeepers realized that anything was amiss. The agents were all instructed to do their work without arousing any suspicion. They had orders every time they rode on a surface-car or patronized the Elevated roads to offer a dollar bill in payment of their fare. Wherever they saw an opportunity to get a bill changed they took it.

A clerk of the Safe Deposit Company reported at noon to Mr. Connors that 12,071,624 pennies, 437,589 nickels, 366,427 dimes, 444,886 quarters and 139,553 half-dollars had been turned in by the assiduous collectors. Telegrams received from Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago and various other cities showed that the efforts there had met with equal success. With the $3,000,000 in small change that Mr. Connors had succeeded in amassing in the preceding weeks through banks and money brokers, he was well satisfied.

At three o’clock on Friday afternoon there was not a bank in the city that had not had its store of small change much depleted by the raids of the dry-goods and department stores. Half an hour later an organized descent was made on all the big department stores by the agents of the syndicate. Ninety of the collectors—the others being still engaged elsewhere, according to orders previously issued, their movements being known only to Mr. Tom Connors—visited in succession the biggest stores in the shopping district, making in various departments a series of purchases of articles advertised at four cents or six cents, or some other small sum that meant at least ninety cents in change from a dollar bill. When Friday evening came the syndicate had succeeded in stripping the shopping district of all its small change.

The work of collecting on Saturday was necessarily much slower, but when Saturday evening came the syndicate had nearly $9,000,000 in fractional currency in its possession and everyone was wondering what made change so scarce. The grand coup was effected at midnight Saturday night. Agents of the syndicate were waiting with paper money at the headquarters of all the penny-in-the-slot machines. More than a million dollars, mostly of pennies, was hurried in guarded trucks to the Safe Deposit offices.

On Sunday afternoon there was another conference in the Senator’s rooms. Connors submitted his report. He told how the markets, the car-barns, the “L” stations, the department stores, the five-and-ten-cent shops had been skilfully but legally looted of all their small change. Not only in one city but in all cities of over ten thousand inhabitants had this been done successfully. There was triumph in his tones as he read the final figures: “Cost of collection, $482,621. Total small change in vaults, $9,464,867.63.”

The Senator smiled a satisfied smile.

“Gentlemen,” said he, “I think we can safely say that our corner is complete. We have cornered the small change. The department stores, the street railways, business everywhere will be at a standstill tomorrow. Small change is essential to modern business. The business men must have it. They must come to us for it. If business stops for a single day, there is hardly a large establishment that can survive. We have them at our mercy! How merciful we are to be, Mr. Martin, I think we should leave to you.”

The others nodded assent.

Mr. Martin adjusted his glasses. He took Mr. Connors’s report and glanced at it with deliberation.

“As the Senator observed,” he began, “the retail business houses must have small change. They must have pennies. Even on Saturday afternoon they were trying to get them. They were offering premiums. As high as six dollars was offered for five dollars in pennies. By Monday noon, with disaster, with suspension, with failure before them, they will gladly pay any price for small change.”

“But, gentlemen”—the banker smiled a philanthropic smile—“we must be generous. We can offer the retailers liberal terms—we can offer them all the small change they want for immediate delivery by Monday noon. We can make the terms seven dollars for five dollars in small change. From what I know of the conditions, I am confident that all the small change we have amassed will be gladly taken at that price. We have on hand in round numbers nine and one-half millions. For this we will receive $13,300,000. Deducting our capital, and the half-million that it cost us for collection, this will still leave us $2,800,000, or something more than a half million apiece after Mr. Connors has had his tenth.”

Monday dawned bright and clear, and Mr. Martin was early in reaching his office at the Safe Deposit Company. So was Mr. Connors. The last thing on Saturday night circulars had been mailed to all the principal retailers and to the street railway companies announcing that the Safe Deposit Company was prepared to supply an unlimited amount of small change on short notice.

“The street-cars caught it hard this morning,” whispered Mr. Connors as he dropped downstairs for a moment to see how things were going. “How are things progressing? Any answers to the circulars yet?”

Mr. Martin shook his head, but he glanced at the clock.

“It’s too early,” he said. “It’ll take them an hour or two to realize what a bad situation they are in.”

“I suppose it will,” said Connors as he went upstairs to send out scouts.

An hour later he was back downstairs in Mr. Martin’s office. The Senator was there, too. Both he and Martin looked worried.

“Say,” said Connors, “something’s gone wrong somewhere. The department stores seem to be doing business the same as ever. And there’s pennies everywhere!”

“That’s just what the Senator was telling me,” said Mr. Martin, with a puzzled air.

“Well, where in blazes are all the pennies coming from?” demanded Connors angrily.

“That is just what Mr. Martin and I expected you to tell us!” said the Senator severely. “Did you clean out all the small change from the markets?”

“And from the department stores?” echoed the banker.

“And from the car-barns?”

“And from the five-and-ten-cent stores?”

“And from the slot machines?”

“And from the children’s banks?”

“Yes, and from a thousand places more!” said Connors.

“How about the churches?” asked the Senator slowly.

All three looked blank. They understood now why the corner had failed.

For everybody knows that, no matter what happens, there are always plenty of pennies in the church collection plates.