Reborn in 1878: America's Number One Bandit

Chapter 139: The Harvest Begins!
At the San Francisco Stock Exchange, merchants, puffing on cigars, loudly mocked the unfortunate Japanese.

"Damn, that's hilarious! What kind of amazing skills does that Gypsy bitch have? Is she worth 1.6 million? Is she made of gold?"

"Shut up, you idiot! The point is the NPCs!"

Another businessman looked grim: "I have another shipment going through their docks next week. If they can even lose raw silk, what am I going to do with my goods? Damn it, I have to switch companies!"

In New York, Wall Street's reaction was more direct and cold.

"NPC's management has clearly lost control."

A banker put down his newspaper and coldly said to his trader, "The last paragraph of the article is very persuasive. Issue a notice to temporarily suspend all credit to NPC. Also, find an opportunity to dump our NPC bonds. I smell rotten flesh."

Panic quickly began to take hold.

NPC's stock began to decline slowly.

$49……$48.50……$48……

Meanwhile, in faraway London, the front page of the London branch of the Globe and Chronicle featured the sketch meticulously drawn by the assassin artist.

Unfortunately, photos cannot be transmitted over long distances in this day and age.

Fortunately, one of Lawson's assassins was skilled in sketching.

The despair on Gota Kubo's face in the painting is more impactful than any words.

The London investors, the British aristocrats and bankers who actually held a large number of shares in NPC, were immediately enraged!

They don't care about the gossip about Gypsy prostitutes; all they see is their investments shrinking!

"What is that idiot Latham doing?"

"He entrusted our money to a piece of trash who only knows how to piss on prostitutes!"

"He must be held accountable for this. Send a telegram to San Francisco immediately and tell him to come out and explain!"

Angry sell orders crossed the Atlantic, and NPC's stock price plummeted.

$47……$46……

The third day, early morning.

Gypsy Kiss Brothel.

Aaron Bryant woke up to a violent shaking.

"Get out of here, Zorina, you bitch, let me sleep a little longer."

"I'm afraid it won't work, you bastard."

Aaron suddenly opened his eyes.

Standing beside his bed was not the flirtatious Gypsy prostitute Zorina.

It's a fucking giant.

Sheriff Marcus, the new law enforcement officer of Marin County, blocked out all the light like a brick wall.

"Aaron Bryant? Fuck, you son of a bitch, you're harder to find than a rat in a courtroom."

Aaron looked at the sheriff in horror, then glanced to the side; Zorina was nowhere to be seen.

"Sheriff? What do you mean? I... I'm the manager of NPC Company!"

He wanted to regain some dignity, but now that he was completely naked, he felt insecure.

"what!"

Marcus grabbed Aaron by the hair and dragged him off the bed.

"Manager? You're just a thief now. Put your pants on, you're arrested! Tsk, that's a small thing!"

"Arrest? Why?"

Aaron was still in a daze. Could he really be arrested for having sex with a prostitute these days?

Marcus pulled an arrest warrant from his waist and waved it in front of Aaron: "Why? Because you're suspected of embezzling a batch of Japanese raw silk worth 1.6 million. You've got some nerve!"

"What did you say?"

Aaron has finally sobered up!
Embezzlement? He understood; now he was the scapegoat!

"No, it wasn't me, it was Latham, he framed me!"

Shut your oozing, pus-filled mouth!

Marcus, too lazy to listen to his nonsense, simply handcuffed him.

“Save your words for the judge. But I suspect those angry Japanese and Mr. Rutham would rather see you hanged from a lamppost.”

Marcus dragged Aaron Bryant, who was only wearing a pair of trousers, out of the brothel and shoved him into the carriage.

On the dock, the workers, seeing their once arrogant manager now in such a sorry state, began to laugh openly.

Aaron Bryant's arrest was just the beginning of the naked chokehold plan.

At the same moment Aaron was taken to prison, the Sausalito docks were paralyzed, and the chaos began.

The largest steam crane on the dock, the Olympia, is lifting a piece of mahogany weighing several tons.

Suddenly, a metallic shriek erupted from the crane's core gearbox!
A dockworker, who was fishing nearby, casually mixed a handful of diamond powder into a few spoonfuls of lubricating oil.

Now, those tiny, hard particles are dancing wildly between the high-speed gears, like millions of miniature piranhas.

"boom!"

The crane boom let out a mournful cry in the air as the massive gear assembly shattered into countless pieces of scorching hot iron, which flew in all directions!

The crane arm twisted and deformed, then collapsed with a crash, smashing the redwood and half of the pier into the sea!

"Oh God!"

The foreman scrambled over, yelling, "Olympia's finished! These damn spare parts have to be shipped from the East Coast, it'll take at least three months, we're doomed!"

Chaos ensued.

"Damn it!"

The Countess, a barge fully loaded with cargo, was entering the port when the helmsman, a suicide soldier, "inadvertently" misjudged the tide.

The barge's bow slammed into the breakwater.

The hull began to rapidly enter the water, and the barge slowly sank.

Its wreckage, no more and no less, blocked the main channel of the deep-water berth.

The pier's throat was locked.

If the docks are the throat, then the railway lines leading inland are the main artery of the North Pacific Coast Railroad.

Now, this artery has also started to bleed.

A critical section of a single-track railway in the northern mountains of California.

The safety valve of the Iron Horse locomotive boiler emitted a sharp whistle, shattering the tranquility of the valley.

"Damn it, the stress is getting out of control!"

The engineers bravely rushed forward and, after some emergency repairs, successfully brought the locomotive to a complete stop.

It malfunctioned and broke down on the tracks.

In the next hour, the other two main locomotives broke down unexpectedly at two other key bottleneck sections.

Northern California’s rail network came to a complete standstill within just one hour.

The final blow came from a hidden bend.

Several assassins disguised as repairmen worked through the night.

They loosened the roadbed and cleverly diverted a mountain spring.

A roadbed collapse that appeared to be purely a natural disaster quietly took shape.

At dawn, a train carrying timber roared in.

"Boom!"

The locomotive and the first three carriages inevitably derailed and tumbled down the hillside.

The carriages behind were squeezed together, and countless pieces of timber rolled down the hillside, thus physically severing the railway.

The docks are closed, the waterways are blocked, and the railways are paralyzed!

A company that claims to be a transportation company lost all its transportation capacity within three hours!

"Extra number, extra number!"

The Globe and Chronicle's response was outrageously fast.

It was as if they had foreseen all of this, and their reporter was standing right next to the exploding crane!
"NPCs are completely paralyzed, the docks are closed, locomotives are destroyed, and Rasham's steel empire has collapsed overnight!"

The latest newspapers flew to San Francisco and New York, and were sent to London by telegram.

Before Rustam could even receive all the bad news in the telegram, the financial markets had already sealed his fate.

London Stock Exchange.

The opening bell has just rung.

An eerie silence filled the hall.

Everyone stared at the sign that read "NPC".

What followed was a hellish panic sell-off!
"Sell! Sell all the NPC stocks! NOW!"

"A transportation company that can't deliver is just a fucking pile of scrap metal!"

"Clearance sale! No matter the price, clear out the stock!"

NPC's stock price plummeted the moment the market opened.

$46 (opening price)...$35 (dock paralysis confirmed)...$22 (railway shutdown confirmed)...$15 (bankruptcy rumors circulate)...$12...$9.50
Finally, the stock price stabilized at a level that everyone considered reasonable.

$8.

A price that might not even be worth bankruptcy liquidation.

Latham's empire is dead on paper.

At the same time that the stock exchange was filled with screams and cries of despair, three peaceful harvests were taking place in three old brokerage firms in London.

Lord Covington's office.

Lord Covington, the banker known for his precise speculation, was now ashen-faced.

He stared intently at the telegraph machine, as if if he kept staring, the numbers would miraculously rise back up on their own.

The door opened, and the assassin Étienne Du Bois, the debonair French banker, walked in.

"Good day, Your Excellency. It seems the weather isn't very suitable for the North Pacific Coast Railroad today. I'm here to fulfill a small contract between us."

Dubois smiled and placed the put option contract on the table.

"6,666 shares, exercise price $45. As you can see, the current market price is $8."

"The difference per share is $37, totaling $246,642. Am I right? Your Excellency, you don't look too good."

"You, you devil!"

Covington pointed at him, trembling: "You knew all along!"

"How could that be, Your Excellency? It's just speculation, isn't it?"

Du Bois's smile vanished, his eyes turning cold: "You speculated on its rise, I speculated on its fall. And, coincidentally, I won. Now, my bank is waiting for you."

Scene 2: Phelps' office.

Fur merchant Buck Carter kicked the door open.

"Damn it, Phelps, I knew those railway sissies were unreliable!"

"The execution price is $44, the market price is $8, a total of 8,000 shares, $36 per share, for a total of $288,000. Here's the money, my good partner!"

Michael Phelps' once incredibly shrewd American agent now had a blank stare in his eyes.

His glorious achievements have come to an end at this moment.

The third scene features a trust company.

German steelmaker Günther Schmidt carefully adjusted his monocle.

"gentlemen."

He said to the ashen-faced trust manager, “According to the contract, the exercise price is $45, the market price is $8, and the total is 7,142 shares. You need to pay me $264,254.”

"I hope to receive my bank draft before the bank closes for the day, thank you."

$246,642, $288,000, $264,254.

A total profit of $798,896 was transferred to Lawson's secret accounts in London, Paris, and Frankfurt within just 24 hours.

Including the original $30,000 principal, Lawson's war fund ballooned to $828,896 overnight.
Those three once-arrogant London speculators went bankrupt.

Under the noose of finance, they are drained of their last drop of blood.

……

The air in Rutham's private office was oppressively heavy.

He was no longer the shrewd financier he once was, but a man in an expensive suit who was drowning.

The cigars were piled up like a small mountain in the crystal ashtray.

The stock price has already fallen to $8, but that doesn't matter anymore.

Who cares?

Stocks are worthless now!

What's really dangerous is the bond payment notice on the table!

A huge sum of $500,000 in interest will be due in five days.

Five days!
Latham’s CFO had just briefed him on the company’s cash flow, if it could still be called cash.

The pile of scrap metal from the Olympia crane is consuming maintenance costs every day.

The dockworkers in Sausalito, led by their foreman, refused to accept any layoffs. They sat there every day playing cards, drinking, and waiting for their wages.

The locomotive wreckage and landslide sections on the railway also require a large amount of funding for cleanup.

The company, which was once a cash cow, is now bleeding thousands of dollars every day!

Income? Zero, not a single penny!

Operations were completely paralyzed.

And Ratsom also had to magically squeeze out $500,000 in cash from a company that was still bleeding money within five days!

He's making a wish here!
He grabbed the phone and roared as he dialed the managers of several other banks in San Francisco, friends who usually fawned over him.

"Walker, I need a short-term loan. Five hundred thousand. Collateralized with NPC's assets."

The voice on the other end of the phone was polite but cold: "Mr. Rutham, I'm sorry. But you mean NPC? A company that's crippled, has a stock price of $8, and whose manager was arrested for embezzling millions of dollars worth of goods? To be frank, its assets are worthless now. The bank's board of directors won't approve it."

"FUCK, you bunch of opportunistic bastards!"

He slammed down the phone and dialed the next one, only to get the same result.

"Junk assets".

"There's nothing I can do to help."

"Good luck, Mr. Latham."

His initial anger has gradually turned into panic. If this problem isn't solved, he really might jump off a building!
But he had another option.

He used money from London and San Francisco banks, along with his own bank's reserves, to fill the holes in his private company.

This is clearly playing with fire.

If the partners in London find out...

"Do not."

He growled to himself, "It's just a short-term loan. Once the dock is repaired, everything will come back."

Just as he was about to start working, the office door was suddenly pushed open.

The secretary swayed her plump backside as she rushed in, clutching a copy of the New York Financial Times that she had just retrieved from the telegraph room.

"Sir, something's happened, there's trouble in London too..."

Latham snatched the newspaper from him.

"Russham's powder keg: Would a banker use depositors' money to save his sinking railroad?"

This is an anonymous analysis report, but it is clearly written by a seasoned financial professional.

The article uses the most scathing and precise language to dissect NPC's financial predicament, directly pointing to the 500,000 yuan interest payment on the soon-to-be-due bond.

"Mr. Rutham is facing a devilish choice."

The article asks: "Should he bankrupt his private railway empire, or illegally use the deposits of widows and orphans who trusted him in London and San Francisco banks to fill this bottomless pit?"

"We must ask: Do the bank's firewalls still exist? Are depositors' funds safe? Or have they become chips in Mr. Rustam's private gamble?"

After watching it, Rasham felt dizzy!

Who are these people? How can they even make predictions?!
It's one thing to make a prediction, but to publicly execute him and humiliate him directly in the newspapers!

This article effectively blocked his last resort.

(End of this chapter)