"It is; angrily so. There is hot talk of a boycott to be extended to everything sold or handled by the Hatch syndicate. I hope there won't be any effort made to introduce strike-breakers. In the present state of affairs that would mean arson and rioting and bloody murder. You can starve a dog without driving him mad, but when you have once given him a bone it's a dangerous thing to take it away from him."
"I wired you because I wanted to consult you once more about those ground leases, Ripley. Do you still think you can make them hold?"
"If Hatch breaks the conditions, we'll give him the fight of his life," was the confident rejoinder.
"But that will mean a long contest in the courts. Hatch will give bond and go on charging the people anything he pleases. The Supreme Court is a full year behind its docket, and the delay will inevitably multiply your few 'croakers' by many thousands. But that isn't the worst of it. Hatch has a better hold on us than the law's delay." And to this third member of his staff Mr. Norcross told the story of the political trap into which Collingwood and the New York stock-jobbers had betrayed the railroad management.
Ripley's comment was a little like Hornack's; less profane, perhaps, but also less hopeful.
"Good Lord!" he ejaculated. "So that is what Hatch has had up his sleeve? I don't know how you feel about it, but I should say that it is all over but the shouting. If the Dunton crowd had been deliberately trying to wreck the property, they couldn't have gone about it in any surer way. They haven't left us so much as a gnawed rat-hole to crawl out of."
"That is the way it looked to me, Ripley, at first; but I've had a chance to sleep on it—as you haven't. The gun that can't be spiked in some way has never yet been built. I have the names of the eleven men who were bribed. Hatch was daring enough to give them to me. Holding the affidavits which they were foolish enough to give him, Hatch can make them swear to anything he pleases. But if I could get hold of those papers——"
"You'd destroy them, of course," the lawyer put in.
"No, hold on; let me finish. If I had those affidavits I'd go to these men separately and make each one tell me how much he had been paid by Bullock for his vote."
"Well, what then?"