"Look at that! Good as gold--if the
courts only knew the law."
He took up a yellow package of valueless obligations upon the top of
which an old-fashioned locomotive from whose bell-shaped funnel the
smoke poured in picturesque black clouds, dragging behind it a chain of
funny little passenger coaches, drove furiously along beside a rushing
river through fields rich with corn and wheat amid a border of dollar
signs.
"The Great Lakes and Canadian Southern," he crooned lovingly. "The child
of my heart! The district attorney kept all the rest--as evidence, he
claimed, but some day you'll see he'll bring an action against the Lake
Shore or the New York Central based on these bonds. Yes, sir! They're
all right!"
He pawed them over, picking out favorites here and there and excitedly
extolling the merits of the imaginary properties they represented. There
were the repudiated bonds of Southern states and municipalities of
railroads upon whose tracks no wheel had ever turned; of factories never
built except in Doc Barrows' addled brain; of companies which had
defaulted and given stock for their worthless obligations; certificates
of oil, mining and land companies; deeds to tracts now covered with sky
scrapers in Pittsburgh, St. Louis and New York--each and every one of
them not worth the paper they were printed on except to some crook who
dealt in high finance. But they were exquisitely engraved, quite lovely
to look at, and Doc Barrows gloated upon them with scintillating eyes.
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