“One night when we were out on the steps back of the Washington statue we saw a shade drifting up and down Wall street in a hazy, dreamy, uncertain sort of way. He looked queer. Evidently he had been portly, and had worn a gray suit, a mess of side whiskers and a straw hat when he had passed into the immaterial world. We made ourselves known to him. We learned that he had been translated early that afternoon and he was trying to find out what the market had done since.
“His name had been Waters and he had been shot by a woman for some reason that he did not explain. We invited him up into the sub-treasury, and while he seemed even more anxious than Red Beard and Teach to get his hands on the gold, he floated blissfully back and forth among the currency and bond stacks so long that we had difficulty in getting him out through one of the pipes and over to the church yard before dawn. We were only able to do this by assuring him that he could go in and mingle with the money every night forever, if it lasted that long, and he replied that he never had suspected that heaven was so fine as all that. We thought that anybody who could regard that neighborhood as heaven was an abnormal optimist, and in the material world he would need immediate medical attention, but then you know some people are that way. After we had heard Water’s history we knew that there was no heaven anywhere that he could ever break into.
“The second night after it had happened, he took us up to what had been his office in one of the robber baron towers on Broad street, in which he had been shot. We found his partner there, a man named Rivetts, who was looting the safe and fixing the accounts so that Waters’ estate would come out at the small end of the horn. Waters visualized and haunted Rivetts so effectually that he jumped through the nineteenth story window into the street, to the great delight of Teach who regarded it as one of the best jokes he had ever known.
“Waters told us that when he was translated he was long a big block of U. S. Steel and short a lot of Reading, and some hyenas were trying to shake him out of the Steel and run him in on the Reading. He pulled over and studied with feverish avidity a basket full of paper tape, from what he called a ticker in the corner, and declared that if he had lived another two days he would have had all their hides on his back yard fence. You may know what some of these expressions mean. To us they seemed technical and confusing, but we gathered that death had deprived Waters of a ship load of pieces-of-eight and we felt very sorry for him.