Appraised at its value in the current coin of street gossip, the legal
seizure of the Trans-Western figured mainly as an example of the failure
of modern business methods when applied to the concealment of a working
corporation's true financial condition.
This unsympathetic point of view was sufficiently defined in a bit of
shop-talk between Harnwicke, the cold-blooded, and his traffic manager in
the office of the Overland Short Line the morning after the newspaper
announcement of the receivership.
"I told you they were in deep water," said the lawyer, confidently. "They
haven't been making any earnings--net earnings--since the Y.S.& F. cut
into them at Rio Verde, and the dividends were only a bluff for
stock-bracing purposes. I surmised that an empty treasury was what was the
matter when they refused to join us in the veto affair."
"That is one way of looking at it," said the traffic manager. "But some of
the papers are claiming that it was a legal hold-up, pure and simple."
"Nothing of the kind," retorted the lawyer, whose respect for the law was
as great as his contempt for the makers of the laws. "Judge MacFarlane had
no discretion in the matter. Hawk had a perfect right to file an amended
petition, and the judge was obliged to act upon it. I'm not saying it
wasn't a devilish sharp trick of Hawk's. It was. He saw a chance to smite
them under the fifth rib, and he took it."
"But how about his client: the woman who was put off the train? Is she any
better off than she was before?"
"Oh, she'll get her five thousand dollars, of course, if they don't take
the case out of court. It has served its turn. It's an ugly crusher for
the Loring management. Hawk's allegations charge all sorts of crookedness,
and neither Loring nor Kent seemed to have a word to say for themselves. I
understand Kent was in court, either in person or by attorney, when the
receivership order was made, and that he hadn't a word to say for
himself."
This view of Harnwicke's, colored perhaps by the fact that the
Trans-Western was a business competitor of the Short Line, was the
generally accepted one in railroad and financial circles at the capital.
Civilization apart, there is still a deal of the primitive in human
nature, and wolves are not the only creatures that are prone to fall upon
the disabled member of the pack and devour him.
But in the State at large the press was discussing the event from a
political point of view; one section, small but vehement, raising the cry
of trickery and judicial corruption, and prophesying the withdrawal of all
foreign capital from the State, while the other, large and complacent,
pointed eloquently to the beneficent working of the law under which the
cause of a poor woman, suing for her undoubted right, might be made the
whip to flog corporate tyranny into instant subjection.
As for the dispossessed stock-holders in the far-away East, they were slow
to take the alarm, and still slower to get concerted action. Like many of
the western roads, the Western Pacific had been capitalized largely by
popular subscription; hence there was no single holder, or group of
holders, of sufficient financial weight to enter the field against the
spoilers.
But when Loring and his associates had fairly got the wires hot with the
tale of what had been done, and the much more alarming tale of what was
likely to be done, the Boston inertness vanished. A pool of the stock was
formed, with the members of the Advisory Board as a nucleus; money was
subscribed, and no less a legal light than an ex-attorney-general of the
state of Massachusetts was despatched to the seat of war to advise with
the men on the ground. None the less, disaster out-travels the swiftest of
"limited" trains. Before the heavily-feed consulting attorney had crossed
the Hudson in his westward journey, Wall Street had taken notice, and
there was a momentary splash in the troubled pool of the Stock Exchange
and a vanishing circle of ripples to show where Western Pacific had gone
down.
In the meantime Major James Guilford, somewhile president of the Apache
National Bank of Gaston, and antecedent to that the frowning autocrat of a
twenty-five-mile logging road in the North Carolina mountains, had given
bond in some sort and had taken possession of the company's property and
of the offices in the Quintard Building.
His first official act as receiver was to ask for the resignations of a
dozen heads of departments, beginning with the general manager and pausing
for the moment with the supervisor of track. That done, he filled the
vacancies with political troughsmen; and with these as assistant
decapitators the major passed rapidly down the line, striking off heads in
daily batches until the over-flow of the Bucks political following was
provided for on the railroad's pay-rolls to the wife's cousin's nephew.
This was the work of the first few administrative days or weeks, and while
it was going on, the business attitude of the road remained unchanged. But
once seated firmly in the saddle, with his awkward squad well in hand, the
major proceeded to throw a bomb of consternation into the camp of his
competitors.
Kent was dining with Ormsby in the grill-room of the Camelot Club when the
waiter brought in the evening edition of the _Argus_, whose railroad
reporter had heard the preliminary fizzing of the bomb fuse. The story was
set out on the first page, first column, with appropriate headlines.
WAR TO THE KNIFE AND THE KNIFE
TO THE HILT!