AN INCIDENTAL SPECULATION
Just when the Interurban Traction Company thought the successful culmination of its plans in sight it woke up to the fact that there had been a miscalculation or an oversight somewhere. It had the absolute or prospective control of all the principal lines embraced in its elaborate scheme of connecting various towns and cities by trolley, which means that it had bought a good deal of the necessary stock and had options on most of the rest; but there was one insignificant little road that it had left to the last. This road had been a losing venture from its inception, and its stock was quoted far below par, with no buyers. As a matter of business policy, the more successful roads should be secured first, for the moment the secret was out their stocks would soar. They represented the larger investments, and their stock-holders could hold on, if they saw the advisability of it, without making any financial sacrifice; they were in a position to “hold up” the new company in the most approved modern style. But the Bington road was weak and unprofitable, valuable only as a connecting link in the chain.
“Of course,” said Colonel Babington, who was at the head of the new venture, “we’re sure to be held up somewhere on the line, and these people can hold us up for less than any of the others. They haven’t much as a basis for a hold-up, and they can’t afford to go on losing money. We can buy their road cheap the first thing, but the discovery of the purchase will give our plans away and add a million dollars to the cost of carrying them out. Any fool would know that we were not buying that road for itself alone. Why, the mere rumor that negotiations were opened would add fifty or a hundred per cent. to the value of the other stocks we want. We can’t afford even to wink at that road until we get control of the others.”
So they went about their work very secretly, hoping so to conceal their design that they would be able to get the last link at the bed-rock price; but, when the time came, entirely unexpected difficulties were encountered. The stock-holders might have been tractable enough, but the stock-holders themselves had been fooled.
“Why, there was a young fellow here last week,” they explained, “and he got a sixty-day option on enough stock to control the road.”
“Who was he?” asked the startled Colonel Babington.
“His name is Horace Lake,” they told him.
“I’ll have to look Horace up,” remarked the colonel thoughtfully.
Meanwhile, Horace was congratulating himself on having done a good stroke of business, and further amusing himself by figuring his possible profit.
“I’ve been looking for just such a chance as this,” he told Dave Murray, the insurance man.