"Wait!" Hatch snarled. "It's going to be both yours and the railroad company's business, before you are through with it. Marrow, here, represents Marshall, and I represent Henckel and myself. What are you going to do about those ground leases?"
"Nothing at all, except to insist upon the condition under which they were granted by the railroad company."
"Meaning that you are going to try to hold us to the fixed percentage charge for handling, packing, loading, and transferring?"
"Meaning just that. If you raise the proportional market-price charge on the producers and merchants, the leases will terminate."
"I thought that was about where you'd land. Now listen: we're It—Marshall and Henckel and I—and what we say, goes as it lies. We are going to use the present C. S. & W. plants and equipment, charging our own storage and handling percentages, based on anything we see fit. If you pull that ground-lease business on us and try to drive us out, we'll fight you all the way up to the Supreme Court. If you beat us there, we'll merely move over to the other side of your tracks to our old Red Tower houses and yards and go on doing business at the old stand."
The boss sat back in his chair, and I could tell by the set of his jaw that he was refusing to be panic-stricken.
"You are taking altogether too much for granted, aren't you?" he put in mildly. "You are assuming that the courts will eventually nullify the terms of the ground-leases, or, if they do not, that the railroad company will do nothing to save its patrons from falling into this new graft trap."
Hatch snapped his fingers. "Now you are coming to the milk in the cocoanut!" he rapped out. "That is exactly what we're assuming. You are going to let go, once for all, Norcross. You are not going to fight us in the courts, and neither are you going to harass us out of existence with short cars, over-charges, and the thousand and one petty persecutions that you railroad buccaneers make use of to line your own pockets!"
"But if we refuse to lie down and let you walk over us and our patrons—what then?" the boss inquired.
That brought the explosion. Hatch's eyes blazed and he smacked fist into palm.