“Will the busy story bear telling?” he asked.
“Yes—to you,” was the half-guarded reply. “You’ll be interested when I tell you that I’m inclined to believe that it’s ‘a little more of the same’—a continuation of our round-up with the ‘wire-devil’ that you straightened out for us a few weeks ago.”
The listener nodded. “Begin back a bit,” he suggested; and Maxwell did it.
“After you went west, we put our wire-devil through the courts, and President Ford served notice on the New York high-finance pirates; told them he had their numbers, and that they’d better let up on us. That was the end of it for the time. But a week ago Thursday I got a hot wire from Ford, telling me to secure voting proxies on every possible share of Short Line stock held locally, firing the proxies to him in New York by special messenger, who should reach him, he said, not later than the night of the fifteenth.”
“Um,” commented the smoker thoughtfully. “Is there much of the stock held out here in your Timanyoni wilderness?”
“A good bit of it, first and last. When the Pacific Southwestern, with Ford at its head, took over the Red Butte Western, the R. B. W. was strictly a local line, and the reorganization plan was based upon an exchange of stock—the new for the old. Then, when we built the extension and issued more stock, quite a block of it was taken up by local capitalists, bankers, mineowners, and ranchmen; not a majority, of course, but a good, healthy balance of power.”
Again the giant in the lounging-chair nodded. “I see,” he cut in. “There is doubtless a stockholders’ meeting looming up in the near future—say on the day after the all-important fifteenth—and the Wall Street people are going after Ford’s scalp again, this time in a strictly legal way. He will probably need your Western proxies, and need them bad.”
“I’ve got them right here,” said Maxwell, tapping a thick bunch of papers on his desk. “And believe me, I’ve had a sweet time rounding them up. Every moneyed man in this country is a friend of Ford’s, and yet I’ve had to wrestle with every individual one of them for these proxies as if I’d been asking them to shed their good red blood.”
“Of course,” was the quiet comment. “The fellows on the other side would stack the cards on you—or try to. What’s in the wind this time? Just a stock-breaking raid for speculation, or is it something bigger than that?”
The young superintendent shook his head doubtfully.