Free Man on a Leash by Charles Williams Page A

hundred range, good solid shares were selling at five or six times earnings, and the big glamour issues were still to come.
    “I first met him in New York in 1945. I’d just got out of the Army and was with Merrill Lynch. He had about twelve thousand dollars in savings and what I thought were very sound ideas on how he wanted to invest it. I’ve handled his business ever since. We had arguments, plenty of them—most of which he won—and I’ll have to admit that more than half the time he was right.
    “Traditionally, you think of shipmasters and seamen as shellbacks and old fogies about a century behind the times, but in the matter of investments Captain Romstead was oriented toward the future all the way. He believed in the new technology—electronics especially, computers, and aerospace. He’d been a radioman himself—”
    “I didn’t know that,” Romstead said.
    “Yes. You see, when he first got his officer’s papers, he was still sailing in Norwegian ships, before he became a U. S. citizen. And in those days it was quite common—as he explained it to me—for one of the mates of a Norwegian ship to double as wireless operator. So he had both tickets then.
    “It was more or less natural then—especially after he started sailing out of here—for him to see the potentialities of the new electronics issues like Ampex, Varian, and Hewlett-Packard. He also bought IBM and Xerox at prices—and before multiple splits—that would make strong men break down and cry if you started talking about them now. And of course, shipmasters were making very good salaries by then; he was working steadily and buying more stock all the time. His portfolio was worth a million or a little over as far back as 1965.”
    “Good,” Romstead said. “Now, for the second part—the pruning job when he liquidated that two hundred and fifty thousand. How does that jibe with your twenty-seven years’ experience with him?”
    “It doesn’t,” Winegaard said flatly. “As my grandchildren would say—no way.”
    “It was that bad?”
    “A child with a pair of scissors could have done just as well.” Winegaard took from his desk a list consisting of three pages clipped together. “This is a copy of our latest statement to him—that is, the shares we held for him in street name. What he did was simply to sell everything on the first page, except for one minor item at the bottom of it. Without going into detail about it, this included two issues we’d bought for him only the week before and that we were very high on, and another he’d had for less than a month and that was performing even better than we’d expected. It makes no sense at all that he would sell these.
    “And on the next two pages there were three stocks we’d already more than halfway decided to unload. Approximately the same amount of money involved, around ninety thousand. I argued with him, or tried to, but he cut me off very abruptly. He didn’t want to argue about it, he said. Sell at the market opening and deposit the proceeds in his checking account as soon as possible.”
    Romstead was conscious of growing excitement. Now they were getting somewhere. “Well, look—did he specifically mention the sum two hundred and fifty thousand as the amount he needed?”
    “No, he didn’t. He’d know, of course, from the previous closing quotations within a few thousand what the list would bring—barring some upheaval in the market overnight. Actually, the proceeds after commission came to something a little over two hundred and fifty-three thousand.”
    “And what was the item at the bottom of the first page that he didn’t sell?”
    “Some warrants. Fifteen hundred dollars altogether, around that.”
    “In other words, he completely ignored everything on the other two pages. And when you tried to bring up some stocks that were listed on these pages is when he cut you off?”
    “Hmmmm, yes. That’s about it.”
    “How did he sound to you? Was there