Sol did not wait to see the finish. The horse won in a gallop.
At the office of Maxim & Gay accounts were figured and checks signed for the full amount of our obligations, and they were immediately mailed to all subscribers.
At midnight I met Sol in the lobby of the St. Charles Hotel. He looked worn.
"Hold us?" I answered. "Nothing better ever happened. It'll make us!"
"You poor nut!" he exclaimed. "Lose $130,000 in a day and it will make you! Stop your noise!"
"Listen!" I rejoined. "At an expense of $3,000 for tolls I have telegraphed a full-page ad to fifty leading city newspapers, telling the public that we tipped this horse to-day at 10 to 1 and that we mailed checks to our customers to-night for $130,000. The gain we will reap in prestige and fresh business will repay our loss on the horse."
The next day the Western Union Telegraph Company found it necessary to assign three cashiers to the work of issuing checks to the Maxim & Gay Company for money telegraphed by new customers. Some individual remittances were as high as $2,000. The money telegraphed us amounted to about $150,000, and within ten days eighty per cent. of our own dividend checks were returned to us by our customers, indorsed back to us with instructions to double their bets, and within two weeks we were able to figure that in the neighborhood of $375,000 was sent us as a result.
During the progress of the New Orleans meeting, I purchased a controlling interest in the New York _Daily America_--a newspaper patterned after the _Morning Telegraph_--from a group of members of the Metropolitan Turf Association, who had sunk about $75,000 in the enterprise. The _Morning Telegraph_ was in the hands of a receiver. I calculated that, by transferring the Maxim & Gay advertisements from the _Morning Telegraph_ to the _Daily America_, I could make the _Daily America_ pay and force the _Morning Telegraph_ out of the field. Later, the late William C. Whitney, who was a shining light on the turf as well as in finance, was induced to purchase the _Morning Telegraph_. Then trouble began to brew for me.
One morning I was summoned to the offices of August Belmont on Nassau Street.
"For the good of the turf, you must omit your Maxim & Gay advertisements from the _Daily America_ and other newspapers hereafter," declared Mr. Belmont on my entering his room.