They were indeed a tangle. Originally the Sherwood estate had
consisted of solid real-estate holdings. But now that Larry had before
him the records of holdings and of various dealings he learned that
the character of the Sherwood fortune had altered greatly. Miss
Sherwood's father had neglected the care of this sober business in
favor of speculative investment and even outright gambling in stocks;
and Dick, possessing this strain of his father, and lacking his
father's experience, had and was speculating even more wildly.
Larry had followed the market since he had been in a broker's office
almost ten years earlier, so he knew what stock values had been and
had some idea of what they were now. The records, and some of the
stock Larry found in the safe, recalled the reputation of the elder
Sherwood. He had been known as a spirited, daring man who would buy
anything or sell anything; he had been several times victimized by
sharp traders, some of these out-and-out confidence men. Studying
these old records Larry remembered that the elder Sherwood a dozen
years before had lost a hundred thousand in a mining deal which Old
Jimmie Carlisle had helped manipulate.
Larry found hundreds and hundreds of thousands of stock in the safe
that were just so much waste paper, and he found records of other
hundreds of thousands in safety deposit vaults that had no greater
value.
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