“No: I said ‘seems,’” answered Wendover. “We know better. We know that from the start you have done nothing but swell around at our expense, and create as many difficulties for us and our business as possible. But the courts and the newspapers would look at it differently. They would be sure to regard you as the one chiefly responsible.”
“I should think we were pretty much in the same boat, my friend,” said Horace, coldly.
“I daresay,” replied the New Yorker, “only with this difference: we can swim, and you can’t. By that I mean, we’ve got money, and you haven’t. See the point?”
Horace saw the point, and felt himself revolted at the naked selfishness and brutality with which it was exposed. The disheartening fact that these men would not hesitate for an instant to sacrifice him—that they did not like him, and would not lift a finger to help him unless it was necessary for their own salvation—rose gloomily before his mind.
“Still, it would be better for all of us that the boat shouldn’t be capsized at all,” he remarked.
“That’s it—that’s the point,” put in Tenney, with animation; “that’s what I said to the Judge.”
“This Tracy of yours,” said Wendover, “has got hold of the Minster girls. He’s acting for them. He has been before Judge Waller with a whole batch of applications. First, in chambers, he’s brought an action to dissolve the trust, and asked for an order returnable at Supreme Court chambers to show cause why, in the mean time, the furnaces shouldn’t be opened. His grounds are, first, that the woman was deceived; and second, that the trust is against public policy. Now, it seems to me that our State courts can’t issue an order binding on a board of directors at Pittsburg. Isn’t it a thing that belongs to a United States court? How is that?”
“I’m sure I don’t know,” answered Horace. “It’s a new question to me.”
“Tenney told me you knew something as a lawyer,” was Wendover’s angry comment. “I’d like to know where it comes in.”
The hardware merchant hastened to avert the threatened return to personalities. “Tell him about the receiver motion,” he said.