"And me."
"Van!" she kissed me with a bit of reproof. "I wish you would be more religious."
My wife had been growing very serious of late. Under May's example she had taken to church work and attended religious classes. She and May had discovered lately a new preacher, who seemed a very earnest young man. The Bible class he had formed sometimes met at our house, and Sarah preferred to go to his church, which was a long way from our house, to the church near by where we had a pew. It made little difference where I was taken to church, and I was glad to have Sarah pleased with her young preacher. So I kissed my wife good-by and hurried off, half an hour late as it was.
There was trouble brewing. It had shown a hand some months back, darkly and mysteriously. One day, while I was East, a man had walked into Slocum's office, introduced himself as a Henry A. Frost, and said that he represented some minority bondholders of the defunct London and Chicago Company. We knew that there were a few scattered bonds outstanding, not more than forty thousand dollars all told, but we had never looked for trouble from them. Mr. Frost represented to Slocum that his "syndicate" did not wish to make us trouble, but that before the property of the London and Chicago concern was finally turned over to our corporation he wished to effect a settlement. Slocum asked him his figure for the bonds held by his "syndicate," believing at the worst that Frost would demand little more than the cash price of fifty. To his astonishment the man wanted par and interest, and when Slocum laughed at his proposal, he threw out hints of trouble that might come if his "syndicate" were not satisfied.
Slocum referred the matter to me, and advised me to seek some compromise with Frost. "For," he said, "our record is not altogether clear in that transaction," referring to the sum we had paid for services to the treasurer of the bankrupt corporation. This move on the part of Frost and his associates was blackmail, of course, but the lawyer advised compromise. It would have been the wise thing to do; but having succeeded so far, I felt my oats too much to be held up in this fashion. I refused peremptorily to deal with the man, and Slocum intimated to him, when he called for a reply, that we would not consider giving him more than the other bondholders had received; namely, fifty per cent of the par value of the bonds he held in new bonds. Frost went off, and we had heard nothing more from him.
Meanwhile we had gone our way, making ready to turn over our properties, rounding up this matter and that, guarding against the tight money market, and quietly getting things in order for putting out our securities. Then one day had come, like a thunderbolt from an open sky, an injunction, restraining the American Meat Products Company from taking over the properties of the London and Chicago Company, the petitioners alleging that they held bonds of the latter concern, and that the sale of its properties to the representatives of the American Meat Products Company had been tainted with fraud. A Judge Garretson, of the Circuit Court, had granted the temporary injunction one night at his house, and the argument for the permanent decree was set for April 10, a fortnight later. The names of the petitioners, all but Frost's, were unknown to us.
"There is the trail of the snake!" Slocum muttered when he had read the injunction. "We had better find Lokes. This will be in the papers to-night, and in the Eastern papers to-morrow morning—you will hear from it all over."
Sure enough, the next noon I had a telegram from Farson in Boston:—
"Papers print injunction A.M.P. Co.; charge fraud. Wire explanation."
"Cousin John didn't let the grass grow under him," Slocum grimly remarked when I handed him this telegram at luncheon. "You had better let me answer him. Now for Lokes: he denies all knowledge, and it's plain enough that he isn't interested in having this matter aired. But some one must have found out pretty accurately what has happened. Perhaps Lokes when he was drunk let out what he had got from us. Anyhow, it's blackmail, and the question is what are we going to do about it. It will cost us a pretty penny to settle now!"