“The devil he did? Then we may assume his interest. But what is it?”
Neither could answer the question. Mr. Ackerman’s varied activities were not blazoned forth to the world. He was more prominent in finance than in commerce, and so far as they knew he was not identified with any lumber business.
“But he must be,” said Locke thoughtfully. “I’ll see what I can find out. It’s strange. I wonder——” He broke off abruptly and pulled out a drawer of his desk, burrowing among the papers. “Yes, here we are. Huh!” He laid two papers side by side and ran his eye down them. “By the Lord Harry, Crooks, Ackerman is a director of the Peninsular Railway, of the Commercial Bank, and of the Northern Loan Company!”
“Is, hey?” Crooks did not see the connection. “He’s in a lot of things besides.”
“Don’t you get it?” Locke rapped out. “That bank was Joe Kent’s till they tried to squeeze him and he changed. The loan company hold his mortgages and threatened foreclosure for an instalment of interest not much overdue. The railway makes a rate that loses money for him. And Ackerman, director in all three concerns, tries to get hold of his business. What do you think of that?”
Crooks’s thought compressed itself into one forcible word.
“So there’s a coon in the tree somewhere,” Locke pursued. “Now, here’s another thing: Clancy Brothers knew of the intended change before the new rate was promulgated. The contract which they tried to obtain would have been absolutely ruinous to Kent. The one they have is bad enough. Therefore we seem to be warranted in assuming some connection between Ackerman and the Clancys.”
The assumption seemed warranted but did not put them much further forward. Out of their speculations two salient points emerged: Some person or persons were hammering the lumber interests along the Peninsular Railway, and Kent’s in particular; and Mr. Stanley Ackerman represented the people who wielded the hammer.
Joe, when told of their deductions, was not nearly as surprised and indignant as he would have been a couple of months before. He was learning in a hard school, and hardening in the process. And his brief and pointed reference to Ackerman, the Clancys, et hoc genus omne, would have done credit to old Bill Crooks in his most vitriolic mood.
“Showing the effect of a modern college education upon the vocabulary,” Locke commented dryly.