“I guess you’re right,” agreed Bobby. “I’ll send Barrister right over, and I think I shall make him take up the remaining ten thousand on his own account. A week from to-night is the council meeting at which the Consolidated must make good to renew their franchise, and we don’t want any hitch in getting our final incorporation papers by that time. The members of the Consolidated are singing swan songs in seven simultaneous keys at this very moment.”
Bobby’s description of the condition of the Consolidated was scarcely exaggerated. It was a trying and a hopeless period for them. The bond issue had failed miserably. It had not needed the Chronicle to remind the public of what a shaky proposition the Consolidated was, for Bobby had thoroughly exposed the corporation during the Bulletin’s campaign against Sam Stone. Bond-floating companies from other cities were brought in, and after an examination of the books threw up their hands in horror at the crudest muddle they had ever found in any investigation of municipal affairs.
On the night of the council meeting, Sharpe and Trimmer and Williams, representing the Consolidated, were compelled to come before the council and confess their inability to take up the bonds required to renew their franchise; but they begged that this clause, since it was an entirely unnecessary one and was not enjoined upon gas or electric companies in other cities, be not enforced. Council, however, was obdurate, and the committee thereupon begged for a further extension of time in which to raise the necessary amount of money. Council still was obdurate, and by that obduracy the franchise of the Consumers’ Electric Company, said franchise being controlled by the Consolidated Illuminating and Power Company, became null and void.
Thereupon Bobby Burnit, President De Graff and Dan Elliston, representing the New Brightlight Electric Company, recently organized for three million dollars, came forward and prayed for a franchise for the electric lighting of the entire city, agreeing to take over the poles and wiring of the Consolidated at a fair valuation; and council was not at all obdurate, which was scarcely strange when one reflected that every member of that municipal body had been selected and put in place through the direct instrumentality of Bobby Burnit. It was practical politics, true enough, but Bobby had no qualms whatever about it.
“It may be quite true that I have not been actuated by any highly noble motives in this,” he confessed to a hot charge by Williams, “but so long as in municipal affairs I am not actuated by any ignoble motives I am doing pretty fairly in this town.”
There was just the bare trace of brutality in Bobby as he said this, and he suddenly recognized it in himself with dismay. What pity Bobby might have felt for these bankrupt men, however, was swept away in a gust of renewed aggressiveness when Trimmer, arousing himself from the ashen age which seemed all at once to be creeping over him, said, with a return of that old circular smile which had so often before aggravated Bobby:
“I am afraid I’ll have to draw out of my other ventures and retire on my salary as president and manager of Trimmer and Company.”
Vengefulness was in Bobby’s eyes as he followed Trimmer’s sprawling figure, so much like a bloated spider’s in its bigness of circumference and its attenuation of limbs, that suddenly he shuddered and turned away as when one finds oneself about to step upon a toad.