“We’d better appoint some one to look after the legal end of things,” suggested the towering Haverman, whose careless, lounging attitude contrasted oddly with his dignified long beard.
“I’ll take care of it,” said W. T. Chisholm, of the Majestic Trust Company, and drawing the statement in front of him, he set a paperweight on it.
“The first step is not one of incorporation,” went on Allison. “Before that is done there must be but one railroad system in the United States.”
Smooth-shaven old Joseph G. Clark nodded his head. There was but one cereal company in the United States, and the Standard, in the beginning, had been the smallest. Two of the heads of rival concerns were now in Clark’s employ, one was a pauper, and three were dead. He disliked the pauper.
Robert E. Taylor, of the American Textiles Company, a man who had quite disproved the theory that constructive business genius was confined to the North, smoothed his grey moustache reflectively, with the tip of his middle finger, all the way out to its long point.
“I can see where you will tear up the east and west traffic situation to a considerable extent,” he thoughtfully commented; “but without the important north and south main trunks you can not make a tight web.”
Allison went over to his wall map, with a step in which there was the spring of a boy. A. L. Vance, of the United States Supplies Company, which controlled beef, sugar, and practically all other food products, except those mighty necessities under the sways of the Standard Cereal Company and Eldridge Babbitt’s National Dairy Products Consolidation, studied the buoyant Allison with a puzzled expression. He had seen Allison grow to care-burdened manhood, and suddenly Ed seemed twenty years younger. Only Eldridge Babbitt knew the secret of this miraculous rejuvenescence. Babbitt had married late in life; a beautiful young woman!
“The key to the north and south situation is here,” said Allison, and he drew a firm, swift, green line down across the United States, branching at each end. “George Dalrymple will be here in half an hour, and by that time I trust we may come to some agreement.”
“It depends on what you want,” boomed Arthur Grandin, who, sitting beside the immense Haverman, looked as if that giant had shrunk him by his mere proximity.
“Freight, to begin with,” stated Allison, resuming his place at the head of the table, but not his seat. “You gentlemen represent the largest freightage interests in the United States. You all know your relative products, and yet, in order to grasp this situation completely, I wish to enumerate them. Babbitt’s National Dairy Products Consolidation can swing the shipment of every ounce of butter, cream, cheese, eggs and poultry handled in this country; Clark’s Standard Cereal Company, wheat, corn, oats, rice, barley, malt, flour, every ounce of breadstuffs or cereal goods, grown on American soil; Haverman, the Amalgamated Metals Constructive Company, every pound of iron, lead, and copper, and every ton of ore, from the moment it leaves the ground until it appears as an iron web in a city sky or spans a river; Grandin, the Union Fuel Company, coal and wood, from Alaska to Pennsylvania, with oil and all its enormous by-products; Taylor, the American Textiles Company, wool, cotton, flax, the raw and finished material of every thread of clothing we wear, or any other textile fabric we use except silk; Vance, the United States Supplies Company, meat, sugar, fruit, the main blood and sinew builders of the country. Gentlemen, give me the freightage controlled by your six companies, and I’ll toss the rest of the country’s freightage to a beggar.”