The Memoirs of an American Citizen Part 25

I tossed it into a drawer, rather annoyed by the silliness of it all. It was the first evidence of weakness I had ever detected in this intelligent woman.

CHAPTER XVII

NO GOSPEL GAME

_Elementary lessons in finance--What is a panic?--The snake begins to show signs of life--An injunction of the court--Inquiries--Ed Hostetter knows our man--How to deal with a political judge--Sloc.u.m objects--My will prevails--The injunction is dissolved_

Sarah and I were sitting over our coffee one morning, six months after the Fair had closed its gates for the last time. Our second child, a little girl, was but a few weeks old, and this was the first morning that Sarah had breakfasted with me for some weeks. She had been glancing at the morning paper, and suddenly she looked up from it with wonder on her face.

"The Tenth National Bank has failed. Isn't that Mr. Cross's bank?"

I nodded.

"Will the Crosses lose all their money?"

"It's likely enough--what's left of it--all his and her folks', too."

"Yesterday some one told me the Kentons were trying to sell their place at the lake. What does it mean? Why are people growing poor?"

"It's the panic," I answered briefly. "Business has been getting worse and worse ever since the Fair. Some think it started with the Fair, but the trouble goes back of that."

She put aside the paper and looked at me seriously.

"Van, what is a panic?"

It seemed strange that she should ask such a question in a simple, childish way. But she had been shut away from people and things of late, and it was not her nature to explore what was not right in her path.

"A panic," I replied, finishing my coffee, "is h.e.l.l! Now I must run and see what has happened to us."

She looked at me in round-mouthed astonishment, and when I bent over to kiss her good-by, she said reprovingly:

"You don't mean it could touch us, Van?"

"It might," I smiled, thinking of the troubled waters where I was swimming.

"We must trust Providence--"

"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 cla.s.ses. She and May had discovered lately a new preacher, who seemed a very earnest young man.

The Bible cla.s.s 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 Sloc.u.m'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 Sloc.u.m 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. Sloc.u.m 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 Sloc.u.m laughed at his proposal, he threw out hints of trouble that might come if his "syndicate" were not satisfied.

Sloc.u.m 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 a.s.sociates 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 Sloc.u.m 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 pet.i.tioners 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 pet.i.tioners, all but Frost's, were unknown to us.

"There is the trail of the snake!" Sloc.u.m 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 gra.s.s grow under him," Sloc.u.m 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!"

The situation was alarming. Unless we could get that injunction dissolved, and speedily, our project faced serious danger. The banker Farson's telegram was only the first. The banks and our backers East and West would soon call us to account.

"It _is_ blackmail," I said to Sloc.u.m, "and if there is a way out we will not pay those rats. Find out what you can about them."

In a day or two he came over to me with the information he had obtained.

The "syndicate" consisted of three or four cheap fellows, hangers-on of a broker's office. One of them happened to be a relative of Judge Garretson, who had issued the midnight injunction.

"I got that last from Ed Hostetter," Sloc.u.m explained. "I met him on the street as I was coming over here. Having heard that this Lucas Smith lived out Ed's way, in May Park, I asked him if he knew anything about the man. He said at once: 'You mean the jedge's brother-in-law? He's a political feller.' Of course this Smith is a b.u.m like the rest."

So we had in Ed, who had come back to work for me, having failed in a market where I had started him after the sausage plant was sold.

"Ed," I said to him, "we want you to find out all you can about this brother-in-law of Judge Garretson's. See if you can learn how many of those London and Chicago bonds he holds."

The next morning Ed brought us the information that Lucas Smith was willing enough to talk, boasting that he and his friends were going "to tune up those packers in good style." Ed thought they had got their tip from one of Lokes's pals. It seems that Smith owned, nominally, only two of the bonds. And there we were! Sloc.u.m rubbed his chin, trying to see light in a dark place.

"What sort of a man is this Judge Garretson?" I asked the lawyer.

"Good enough for a political judge, I guess. He's up for reelection this fall. There was some talk about his att.i.tude in traction cases, but nothing positive against him."

"See here, Ed!"--I turned to Hostetter abruptly--"I want you to go straight out to this Lucas Smith's place and find him. Tell him you know where he can get twenty-five thousand dollars for those two bonds of his the day Judge Garretson dissolves that injunction."

"Hold on, Van!" Sloc.u.m interposed. "That is too strong! I stuck by you last time, but I won't stand for this!"

"Go on, Ed!" I called out to Hostetter peremptorily. "Tell him just that--the day the injunction is dissolved he gets twenty-five thousand dollars for his bonds, and the other rats don't get a cent!"

Sloc.u.m rose without a word and put on his hat. I put my hand on his shoulder and pushed him back into his chair.

"You aren't going to quit like that, Sloco, after all these years! Think it over. What else is there for us to do? Can we have this business aired in court? What will Farson say to that story of Lokes's? Do you think we could buy the bonds from those _rats_ for any likely figure?--for any figure, if Carmichael is waiting around the corner to pick up our cake when we are forced to drop it?"

He sank into the chair rather limp, and we looked at each other for a minute or two.

"Well," he said slowly, "it might as well come out now as later."

"You have got to sit in the boat with me, Sloco! I need you." I leaned across the table and looked into his eyes. Slowly, after a time, he nodded, and gave himself up to me to do my will. In the heat of my trouble, I scarce realized what that acquiescence cost him: he never gave another sign. But it cost him, one way and another, more than I ever could repay,--and now I know it.