"For six months, Norcross, you've been mowing a pretty wide swath out here in the tall hills. You've been posing as a little tin god before the people of this State, and all the while you've been knifing and slugging and black-jacking private capital and private business wherever and whenever they have happened to get in your way. Now, at the end of the lane, by Jupiter, we've got you dead to rights—you and your damned railroad!"
"Cut out as many of the personalities as you can, and come to the point," suggested the boss quietly.
"You think I haven't any point to come to?" barked the grafter, with rising anger. "I'll show you! You've beaten us in the courts, and your imported lawyers have——"
"Excuse me, Mr. Hatch," was the curt interruption. "Abuse isn't argument. State your case, if you have one."
"Oh, I've got the case, all right. You've been keeping your finger on the pulse, or you think you have, but I can wise you up to a few things that have got away from you. You thought you were the only original trust-buster when you started your scheme of locally owned elevators and warehouses and coal- and lumber-yards and ran us out of business. But I'm here to tell you that your fine-haired little deal to rob us began to die about as soon as it was born."
"How so?" inquired the boss, just as though Major Kendrick hadn't already given him his pointer about the how.
"In the way that everything of that kind is bound to die. It wasn't a month before your little local stockholders began to get together and swap stock and sell it. In a very short time the control of the whole string of local plants was in the hands of a hundred men. To-day it's in the hands of less than twenty, with John Marshall at the head of them."
This time the boss let out a notch. "So far, you haven't told me anything new. Go on."
"If I should name Marshall's bunch, you'd know what's coming to you. But we needn't go into statistics. Citizens' Storage & Warehouse is now a consolidated property, and John Marshall, Henckel and I control a majority of its stock. How does that strike you?"
"It strikes me that the people most deeply interested have been exceedingly foolish to sell their birthright. But that is strictly their own business, and not mine or the railroad company's."