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“Well, since this is the third time my grandchildren who live at the Veteran's Lodge can't play in their yard or fill their bathtub in as many weeks because the water main is out, I don't care that Col. Lee has these people singing the blues in a bathtub of tears – sell it all anyway, because it's still worth money today but won't be when the Lofton Trust is finished with them and the treble damages!”

Thomas Stepforth Sr., billionaire wheeler and dealer, was on the phone adding injury to insult for the companies that had messed up big-time but were publicly traded.

“In fact, sell it all, and then short it – they don't have the $46 million on hand and can't get it by Monday, and then the Lofton Trust and the county are going to kill them or they are going to go bankrupt – and they need to be out of business, so we're going to push them over. Oh? Well, put the stop loss at one *billion* dollars – if they can get their stock back up that high, I'll take that hit and gladly, because at this point, I don't want these people building anything where my grandchildren are growing up, and that's Planet Earth. They gotta go – sell it all, and then short it, and I'll back that short to a billion. *They gotta go.”*

“So, imagine the situation,” nine-year-old Milton Trent said to his nine-year-old first cousin Vertran Stepforth as they listened to their grandfather. “You get up in the morning, and your day is beautiful. You have your bath, and it might even be a bubble bath, and you drink whatever adults drink when they have their bubble baths in the movies, and then you have a nice breakfast, and a nice lunch, and then you hear that pesky water main break has broken again, but there are people that do those things, and you got away with it before, and you have no idea that both Col. H.F. Lee and our grandfather are coming after you.”

“Well, at least tomorrow, the bathtub will already be full,” Vertran said. “The market doesn't close for an hour, so you know Pop-Pop is going to have stuff sold and shorted before the close of the market. So they can cry tonight and have the bathtub ready tomorrow.”

“I don't know if a saltwater bath is not going to sting a little bit,” Milton said. 

“Look, Milton, they need to go on and have a bath while they still have a bathtub. You know how Pop-Pop is, and we've just seen Col. Lee on the livestream.”

“And he's usually so calm too,” Milton said, “but he doesn't play about our Ludlow friends just like Pop-Pop doesn't play about us.”

“Our adults really do love us,” Vertran said, “and that's a real good thing. Not good for the people making trouble, but real good for us.”

“What I'm trying to figure out,” Milton said, “is where are the adults for all these adults who are messing up and not warned before they meet our adults who are going to mess them up.”

“That's a good question,” Vertran said. “Somebody needs to get somebody on a bunch of missing persons' cases, because those people whose job it is to keep other people from messing up have definitely been kidnapped.”