But Locke, after he had waded through the papers, tossed them back to Wright. “No good,” he said. “What’s here doesn’t amount to a contract, though it comes mighty close to it.”
“It comes so close to it that we had cars run up the spur and started to load,” said Wright. “The understanding was—”
“It had no business to be,” Locke interrupted. “You’ve shown me all the papers in the matter, haven’t you? Very well, I tell you they don’t amount to an agreement. They’re simply a series of proposals, rejections, and requests for other proposals, though you came very nearly agreeing. While you’re dickering some one cuts in with a better rate and they call it off. You can’t hold them.”
“But nobody could underbid us; we quoted ’em rock bottom,” Wright persisted. That was the main point in his mind.
“Oh, pshaw, Wright, have some sense!” snapped Locke. “That may be an excuse, or it may not. It’s quite immaterial. Can’t you see that?”
“That’s all right from a lawyer’s standpoint, but not from ours,” said Wright. “Barker & Smith use a lot of lumber, and they’re not in business to lose money. I say nobody could underbid us. They lie when they say they got a better rate. What do they want to lie for? It’s money out of their pockets.”
“I’m a lawyer, not a mind reader,” Locke reminded him. “Your quotations were f.o.b. Falls City. It’s just possible the freight rate may have something to do with it.”
Wright returned to the office, pulled out his tariff books and compared the rate from Falls City to Oshkook with rates from other competitive points to the latter place.
“We’ve got ’em skinned there, too,” he soliloquized. “They can’t lay down any lumber cheaper than ours. It beats me.”
For an hour he pulled at a blackened brier and pondered the question. Then he went to Kent.