To do this safely, it was necessary to
have a friend outside of the firm. Such a friend he did not find it
very hard to obtain; and as nearly the whole burden of the business
fell upon his shoulders, it was not at all difficult to hide every
thing from Jasper.
Confident as Parker was in his great shrewdness, his speculations
outside of the business did not turn out very favourably. His first
essay was in the purchase of stocks, on which he lost, in a week, two
thousand dollars.
Like the gamester who loses, he only played deeper, in the hope of
recovering his losses; and as it often happens with the gamester, in
similar circumstances, the deeper he played, the more he lost.
And so it went on. Sometimes the young man had a turn of good fortune,
and sometimes all the chances went against him. But he was too far
committed to recede without a discovery. There was no standing still;
and so newer and bolder operations were tried, involving larger and
larger sums of money, until the responsibilities of the firm, added
to the large cash drafts made without the cognizance of Jasper, were
enormous.
To all such mad schemes the end must come; and the end came in this
instance. Failing to procure, by outside operations, sufficient money
to meet several large notes, he was forced to divulge a part of his
iniquity to Jasper, in order to save the credit of the firm.
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