“My chief clerk,—the young man who admitted you here,—I hope you can provide for him, Mr. Dimmock. Apart from any personal relations, I have found him the most faithful, the most painstaking——”
The new receiver lifted a faultlessly manicured hand in genial protest.
“You know I couldn’t do that, Mr. Maxwell,” he objected. “Your young man has probably been much too close to you to make it possible or prudent. You are a rich man yourself, and you can very easily provide for your secretary, as I make no doubt you will. Must you go? Don’t be in a hurry. We needn’t make this a personal fight, I’m sure.”
The ex-superintendent looked at his watch and told a lie for the sake of keeping the peace.
“It is my luncheon hour,” he said. “If there are any routine matters upon which you may wish to consult me, you will find me over at the hotel.” And he went out with his hat pulled over his eyes and his blood boiling. To have stayed another minute would have been to risk an explosion.
It was a small but exceedingly fervent indignation meeting which gathered in Attorney Stillings’s office in the Kinzie Building a little after twelve o’clock on this day of cataclysms. When Maxwell entered, Stillings was trying to explain to Starbuck and Sprague and Editor Kendall—who had been hauled out of bed to lend his presence to the conference—just how it had come about.
As it appeared in the wrathful summing up, it had happened very easily; so easily as to present every indication of careful prearrangement. When the Hixon case had been called in court, Stillings had risen and asked for a further postponement, having, as it chanced, a very good excuse in the fact that the witness by whom he expected to prove that Hixon’s claim of a lost mining sale was a pure invention was absent. Instantly the Kentucky colonel counsel for the plaintiff had jumped up, not to protest against the further delay, but to introduce his colleague in the cause—the stranger whose name on the Hophra House register was Mr. Peter Hunniwell.
Before Stillings could get his breath, Hunniwell was on his feet, making an impassioned plea for justice. Rapidly rehearsing the course of the defendant railroad company, which he charged with maliciously striving to defeat the ends of justice, he summed up with a still more serious charge, namely, that the railroad was not only unwilling to pay the just claims upon it, but was unable to do so; was, in effect, practically bankrupt, as the thick packet of affidavits, which he here passed up to the judge, would sufficiently prove.
“After that,” Stillings went on, “it was biff! bang! and the fight was over. Judge Watson merely glanced through the affidavits—which may or may not be purely faked—while Hunniwell, in a voice like a steam calliope, was demanding that the court appoint a receiver. It was so ridiculous, so absolutely beyond all precedent, that it didn’t seem worth while to try to call him down. When Hunniwell finally quit, the judge was looking over his spectacles at us in that mild, half-vacant way of his, and saying, ‘I think your point is very well taken. It is time that something was done to bring these defendant corporations to a sense of their responsibilities to the plain people. I shall appoint, as temporary receiver, Mr. C. F. Dimmock, the appointment to take effect this day at noon.’ At noon, mind you!” choked Stillings. “And it was at that moment half-past eleven!”
“Of course, you tried to break in,” said Maxwell.