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The Affair of the 'Avalanche Bicycle and Tyre, Co., Ltd.'
by Arthur Morrison
Copyright, 1897, by Arthur Morrison, in the United States of America.
THE AFFAIR OF THE "AVALANCHE BICYCLE & TYRE CO., LTD."
CYCLE companies were in the market everywhere. Immense fortunes were being made in a few days and sometimes little fortunes were being lost to build them up. Mining shares were dull for a season, and any company with the word "cycle" or "tyre" in its title was certain to attract capital, no matter what its prospects were like in the eyes of the expert. All the old private cycle companies suddenly were offered to the public, and their proprietors, already rich men, built themselves houses on the Riviera, bought yachts, ran racehorses, and left business for ever. Sometimes the shareholders got their money's-worth, sometimes more, sometimes less -- sometimes they got nothing but total loss; but still the game went on. One could never open a newspaper without finding, displayed at large, the prospectus of yet another cycle company with capital expressed in six figures at least, often in seven. Solemn old dailies, into whose editorial heads no new thing ever found its way till years after it had been forgotten elsewhere, suddenly exhibited the scandalous phenomenon of "broken columns" in their advertising sections, and the universal prospectuses stretched outrageously across half or even all the page -- a thing to cause apoplexy in the bodily system of any self-respecting manager of the old school.
In the midst of this excitement it chanced that the firm of Dorrington & Hicks were engaged upon an investiga