"I say!" exclaimed Mr. Spillikins, "they ought to go to jail for a thing like that."
"And the infernal insolence of them," Mr. Fyshe continued. "I went down the next day to see the deputy assistant (about a thing connected with the same matter), told him what I wanted and passed a fifty dollar bill across the counter and the fellow fairly threw it back at me, in a perfect rage. He refused it!"
"Refused it," gasped Mr. Spillikins, "I say!"
Conversations such as this filled up the leisure and divided the business time of all the best people in the city.
In the general gloomy outlook, however, one bright spot was observable. The "wave" had evidently come just at the opportune moment. For not only were civic elections pending but just at this juncture four or five questions of supreme importance would be settled by the incoming council. There was, for instance, the question of the expropriation of the Traction Company (a matter involving many millions); there was the decision as to the renewal of the franchise of the Citizens' Light Company—a vital question; there was also the four hundred thousand dollar purchase of land for the new addition to the cemetery, a matter that must be settled. And it was felt, especially on Plutoria Avenue, to be a splendid thing that the city was waking up, in the moral sense, at the very time when these things were under discussion. All the shareholders of the Traction Company and the Citizens' Light—and they included the very best, the most high-minded, people in the city—felt that what was needed now was a great moral effort, to enable them to lift the city up and carry it with them, or, if not all of it, at any rate as much of it as they could.
"It's a splendid movement!" said Mr. Fyshe (he was a leading shareholder and director of the Citizens' Light), "what a splendid thing to think that we shan't have to deal for our new franchise with a set of corrupt rapscallions like these present aldermen. Do you know, Furlong, that when we approached them first with a proposition for a renewal for a hundred and fifty years they held us up! Said it was too long! Imagine that! A hundred and fifty years (only a century and a half) too long for the franchise! They expect us to install all our poles, string our wires, set up our transformers in their streets and then perhaps at the end of a hundred years find ourselves compelled to sell out at a beggarly valuation. Of course we knew what they wanted. They meant us to hand them over fifty dollars each to stuff into their rascally pockets."
"Outrageous!" said Mr. Furlong.
"And the same thing with the cemetery land deal," went on Mr. Lucullus Fyshe. "Do you realize that, if the movement hadn't come along and checked them, those scoundrels would have given that rogue Schwefeldampf four hundred thousand dollars for his fifty acres! Just think of it!"
"I don't know," said Mr. Furlong with a thoughtful look upon his face, "that four hundred thousand dollars is an excessive price, in and of itself, for that amount of land."
"Certainly not," said Mr. Fyshe, very quietly and decidedly, looking at Mr. Furlong in a searching way as he spoke. "It is not a high price. It seems to me, speaking purely as an outsider, a very fair, reasonable price for fifty acres of suburban land, if it were the right land. If, for example, it were a case of making an offer for that very fine stretch of land, about twenty acres, is it not, which I believe your Corporation owns on the other side of the cemetery, I should say four hundred thousand is a most modest price."