The boss's reply ignored the details. "We're in for it again," he announced briefly. "The local companies couldn't hold on to a good thing when they had it. The stock has been swept up, first into little heaps, and then into big ones, and now the Hatch people have forced a practical consolidation."
"Is that the fact?—or only the way you are doping it out?" queried the traffic manager.
"It is the fact. Hatch came here last night to tell me about it; also, to tell me where we were to get off."
Hornack bit off a piece of the chewed cigar and took a fresh hold on it.
"Does he think for one holy half minute that we're going to sit down quietly and let him undo all the good work that's been done?" he rasped.
"He does—just that. He's putting us in the nine-hole, Hornack, and up to the present moment I haven't found the way to climb out of it."
"But the ground leases?" Hornack began. "Why can't we pull them on him?"
"We might, if we hadn't been shot dead in our tracks by the very men who ought to be backing us to win," said the boss soberly. And then he went on to tell about the new grip Hatch had on us.
Of course, Hornack blew up at that, and what he said wasn't for publication. For a minute or so the air of the office was blue. When he got down to common, ordinary English again he was saying, between cusses: "But you can't let it stand at that, Norcross; you simply can't!"
"I don't intend to," was the even-toned rejoinder. "But anything we can do will always lack the element of finality, Hornack, while Wall Street owns us. I've said it a hundred times and I'll say it again: the only hope for the public service corporation to-day lies in a distribution of its securities among the people it actually serves."