“Iss id vor a meeting ov ze directors ve are here, Mr. Presidend?” asked Mordecai. He was the eminent banker. He spoke sweetly and lisped slightly as he always did when annoyed.
“This is a directors’ meeting,” said the president, adding: “The secretary will read the call.”
“Please God!” exclaimed Gates, not yet ready to be extinguished. “Put it on the record. I ask: Are there any stockholders present? No answer. Again I ask: Are there any stockholders present? No answer. Great embarrassment. What is to be done? Idea! This is a directors’ meeting. Bravo! Proceed. On with the stockholders’ business. We are not stockholders. Therefore we shall be able to transact their business impartially.”
There was a distraught silence.
“Proceed,” said Gates. “I shan’t interrupt the services any more.”
What followed was brief. A resolution was offered and passed to the secretary to be read, setting out that owing to conditions which left the directors helpless and blameless, to wit: the depression of trade, the distrust of securities, the rapacity of the tax gatherer, the harassment of carriers by government agencies, et cetera, the Great Midwestern was unable to pay its current debts, wherefore counsel should be instructed to carry out the formalities of putting the property in the hands of the court.
“Is there any discussion?” asked the president.
Horace Potter, of oil, spoke for the first time. He was a sudden, ferocious man with enormous gray eyebrows and inflammable blue eyes.
“Have a glance at Providence,” he said. “We damn everything else. Say the crops are a disgrace. That’s true and it’s nobody’s fault here below.”
“Yes, that should go in,” said the president. He took back the resolution, wrote into it with a short lead pencil the phrase, “and the failure of crops over a large part of the railroad’s territory,” and offered it to be read again. Everybody nodded. He called for the vote. The ayes were unanimous, and the aye of Jonas Gates was the loudest of all.