“Has Mr. Allison been more unfair than others who have made big consolidations?” demanded Gail, again aware of the severely inquiring eye of Aunt Helen.
“Rotten!” replied her uncle, with an emphasis in which there was much of personal feeling. “He has taken tricky advantage of every unprotected loophole. He won from the Inland Pacific, at the mere cost of trackage, a passage which the Inland built through the mountains by brilliant engineering and at an almost countless cost.”
“Isn’t that accounted clever?” asked Gail.
“So is the work of a confidence man or a wire-tapper!” was the retort. “But they are sent to jail just the same. The Inland created something. It built, with brains and money and force, and sincere commercial enterprise, a line which won it a well-earned supremacy of the Pacific trade. It was entitled to keep it; yet Allison, by making with it a tricky contract for the restricted use of the key to its supremacy, uses that very device to destroy it. He has bankrupted, or will have done so, a two thousand mile railroad system, which is of tremendous commercial value to the country, in order to use a hundred miles of its track and remove it from competition! Allison has created nothing. He has only seized, by stealth, what others have created. He is not even a commercial highwayman. He is a commercial pickpocket!”
Gail had paled by now.
“Tell me one thing,” she demanded. “Wouldn’t any of the railroad men have employed this trick if they had been shrewd enough to think of it?”
“A lot of them,” was the admission, after an awkward pause. “Does that make it morally and ethically correct?”
“You may be prejudiced, Jim,” interpolated Aunt Helen, moving closer to Gail. “If they are all playing the game that way, I don’t see why Mr. Allison shouldn’t receive applause for clever play.”
“You bet I’m prejudiced!” snarled Sargent, overcoming his weariness and pacing up and down the library floor. “He came near playing my road the same trick he did the Inland Pacific. He secured control of the L. and C., because it has a twenty-year contract for passage over fifty miles of our track. He’d throw the rest of our line away like a peanut hull, if he had not promised Gail to protect me. I’m an object of charity!”
“Oh!” It was a scarcely audible cry of pain. Aunt Helen moved closer, and patted her hand. Gail did not notice the action.