White Ashes Part 33

"Well, then," the other answered, "I was going to say 'To h.e.l.l with Gunterson!'"

Mr. Wintermuth leaned back in his chair, with his eyes fixed on his subordinate.

"Cuyler," he said, "Mr. Gunterson is your superior officer, and that was an entirely improper thing for you to say. But I've known you, Cuyler, for forty years, and I don't mind telling you that that is exactly what I have been wanting to say about Mr. Gunterson for the last three weeks."

A rueful smile broke through the gloom of both.

"Well, I'm glad you feel the same way about it, and I'm glad I got it out of my system; but I don't see that it helps things much, does it?"

the local underwriter replied.

"I'm not so sure of that," said Mr. Wintermuth. "It helps me, and possibly the a.s.sistance will spread to the whole situation later on."

Meanwhile the gentleman who was thus summarily consigned to the infernal regions was doing his vague utmost to cope with three situations at once, any one of which would have been entirely beyond his capabilities to control. New York, Philadelphia, and the Eastern field as a whole,--each was a problem in itself, and each was getting farther and farther out of hand. The Guardian's field men were demoralized, beholding the fine agency plant of their company crumble and melt away while they stood helpless to hold it together. And Mr.

Gunterson, when asked for remedies, could reply only in nebulous words of even more crepuscular and doubtful pertinence. New York was admittedly beyond him, and Philadelphia, harkening to siren voices that promised great things, was presently to vote on the separation rule for that city.

It is a depressing business, this watching the burning of one's own ancestral house, the sinking of one's proudest ship of all the fleet.

It was altogether too much for Mr. Wintermuth. For nearly a week he was missing from the office, and no man at the Guardian knew of his whereabouts. With the decline in volume of the company's business, the amount of routine work in the office became unbearably, demoralizingly light. The map clerks loafed and the bookkeepers joked with one another. Smith found time hanging heavy on his hands; but by Mr.

Gunterson's orders he stayed at his desk, although he could have done much, had he been permitted to go out among his agents in the field, to stem the tide.

In the local department the atmosphere was charged with the contagious mourning of Mr. Cuyler, who with funereal face sat contemplating the shrinkage of his business. For with the loss of his branch manager and his two best brokers, there was a deficit in his premium returns which he could not overcome. And certainly his melancholy countenance did not attract business; it was a bold placer indeed who tried with quip and banter to secure Mr. Cuyler's acceptance of a doubtful risk. His world was awry, and all who ran might read it. His brow became unpleasantly corrugated, his smile a thing of the past. If Mr.

O'Connor had wanted evidence of the success of his local campaign, he could have gained it from one look at Mr. Cuyler.

Above stairs, however, doom being still a matter of immediate prospect rather than a thing accomplished, Mr. Gunterson still held forth, maintaining a sort of fict.i.tious calm. At times he was even cheerful, and did his best to rally his dazed and despondent subordinates. But Bartels, seeing slip away accounts of agents he had audited for twenty years, was in a state of stubborn, uncompromising rage which closely resembled the dementia of a dumb animal, and Mr. Gunterson could do nothing with him. Still the Vice-President struggled manfully to keep his head above water, to seem cheerful and optimistic. He came from his room one morning, and spoke briskly to Smith.

"I notice that some of your clerks leave their hats around loose instead of hanging them up," he said. "That should not be allowed in a well-conducted office. Please give the necessary orders."

Smith looked at him. This was the closest Mr. Gunterson had come to real contact with the vital problems before him. A company in his charge was disintegrating under his hesitant and futile hand--and he talked about clerks' hats which should properly be hung up!

"Yes, sir," said Smith, quietly. "I'll speak about it."

The weeks followed one another with intolerable slowness. March began, and dragged its weary length along, and still the darkness increased in the Guardian's skies. From Boston the Sternberg, Bloom, and McCoy losses were beginning to come with the frequency and regularity of the shots from a rapid-fire gun. The East was thoroughly disorganized, and even the West, apparently by some subtle psychological influence, was beginning to experience a sympathetic slump. Philadelphia still hung on, the local agents not having been able to agree on any plan of compensation for separating its Conference sheep from their alien goat a.s.sociates.

Mr. Wintermuth, silent and noncommittal, had returned to the office, but took little part in the conduct of his company's underwriting affairs. And in this manner March wore itself almost out--and it seemed as though the Guardian's span of life were growing rapidly shorter.

On the last day of the month there was a meeting of the directors in the closed room off the President's own. It was a short meeting, and Mr. Wintermuth did the most of the talking, while Mr. Whitehill, who had advocated the election of Mr. Gunterson, had little to say. And so it befell that the directors, after voting him salary in advance for a liberal term, accepted the resignation from the Guardian of Samuel Gunterson; and to fill the vacancy so created, there was unanimously elected to be Vice-President and under-writing manager, Richard Smith.

CHAPTER XVI

Smith took office at nine o'clock on the first business day of April.

The fifteen minutes following were spent by him in patiently listening to Mr. Wintermuth's diagnosis of the various ills with which the Guardian was afflicted, related supposedly for his education. When the first pause was reached, the new Vice-President said:--

"I've followed things pretty carefully, sir; and with what you have just told me I think I know about where we stand. We're certainly in bad shape at present, from the agency standpoint, but it's by no means hopeless. And financially we seem to be well off. I looked over the statement Mr. Bartels gave me last night, and since the first of the year some of our investments must have appreciated handsomely; I see that Ninth National Bank stock is selling away above the valuation we put on it in our statement."

"Yes; it is thought that some of the Duane Trust Company people are trying to buy a controlling interest," the President responded more cheerfully.

"But of course that is not in my province," Smith continued. "The question with me is what immediate action to take with reference to the agency plant. Now, Boston is gone--there's no hurry there. Buffalo is lost, too. It seems unlikely that New York will get in any deeper trouble this week or next--although of course you can't tell. But Philadelphia and Pittsburgh need attention right away." He glanced at the small clock on Mr. Wintermuth's desk. "If you'll excuse me, sir,"

he said, "I think I can make the ten o'clock on the Pennsylvania. I brought my suitcase down here, thinking that I might want to start in a hurry."

"Go ahead, my boy. Good luck," said his chief.

And so Smith caught the ten o'clock express from the Pennsylvania station, leaving behind him in the Guardian office an elderly gentleman in whose breast an undefined cheerfulness had awakened. But it was to neither Philadelphia nor Pittsburgh that the Vice-President's ticket read; he had taken a ticket to Harrisburg.

Many years before, the Attorney-General of the state of Pennsylvania had been a famous football player at the state university; whether his gridiron career had any bearing on his legal equipment or not was a question, but it certainly did not make him a worse man. His name was James K. Prior, he stood six feet one, and weighed two hundred pounds.

Mr. Prior was a believer in modern government, although in fighting his way up to the attorney-generalship he had seen enough of the Pennsylvania variety to have given a lesser optimist his doubts. He also believed in modern business conditions, and so far as he properly could, he officially encouraged what he regarded as being legitimate commercial combinations. But he did not believe in trusts. He had followed local legislation long enough to be very sure that there was in it far too much sophistry and too little equity, and he was a strong upholder of what he termed fair play, whether it came peacefully along statutory lines or whether it had to be jerked raw from the shambles of a hundred confused and specious lawyer-made laws.

All in all, he made an active and satisfactory attorney-general.

Now it chanced that during the last session of an unusually prolific legislature a political opponent of Mr. Prior's had contrived to secure the pa.s.sage of a bill designed to give a certain lat.i.tude to certain rather questionable combinations of capital, known in the vernacular as trusts. Senator McGaw, Mr. Prior's antagonist, had managed this bit of special legislation very craftily indeed. The bill was so innocently worded as to disarm the most vigilant and radical trust-buster; it appeared as though its purpose was exactly the reverse of that for which it had been subtly designed; in fact, in an excessive effort to avert suspicion a couple of clauses had found their way into this doc.u.ment which gave Mr. Prior some of the keenest pleasure of his career.

"You are perfectly safe in signing that bill, Governor," he had said to the State's chief executive, who had asked his advice in the matter.

"I'll bet my professional reputation that the courts will hold that it gives us more than it takes away. McGaw's people think it ties the State's hands from proceeding against concerns which operate in restraint of trade by restricting their distributing centers. Instead of which we'll have them on the hip--that section four went a little too far. Just let one of them try to keep his product exclusively in the hands of his sole distributers, and I give you my word I'll have the responsible officer of that concern in jail! Go ahead and sign the bill, Governor--it's all right with me."

It was the draft of this bill, now signed and recently become a law, which occupied the attention of Smith during a large part of the ride from New York to Harrisburg. And the more he studied it, the more hopeful became his expression. And it was with the most buoyant of steps that he made his way from Harrisburg station to the office of Mr.

Prior. To that distinguished gentleman he sent in a card whereon he added after his name two things: first, "Vice-President Guardian Fire Insurance Co. of New York," and second, by a whimsical but considered afterthought, "I saw you kick that goal from the field against Cornell."

Mr. Prior was thoroughly inured to conversing with corporation executives,--they were no novelty to him,--presumably, therefore, it was the second memorandum which caused Smith to be ushered almost immediately into the presence of the Attorney-General, who regarded his visitor with a good-humored smile on his clean-shaven lips.

"Mr. Smith, I presume?" he inquired.

"Yes, sir," the other answered.

"I gather from this card," Mr. Prior pursued, glancing at it, "that you remember having seen me--elsewhere."

"When I was fifteen years old," Smith replied. "And I've been to a good many games since, but I don't think I ever saw any one else kick a goal from the field at a mean angle on the forty-yard line with a stiff wind quartering against him."

"Perhaps not--at least in the last two minutes of play," the Attorney-General agreed reflectively; and the New Yorker could easily pardon this embellishment.

It was some little time later when Mr. Prior somewhat reluctantly returned to things mundanely legal so far as to ask his caller's business.

Smith explained.

When, on the following afternoon, he walked into President Wintermuth's office, if there was in his manner a certain undertrace of elation, it must be forgiven him, for this, his first stroke in his broad horizon, seemed thus far up to every expectation of success.

"Well, what did you do?" was Mr. Wintermuth's greeting, as he looked up to find Smith before him.

"The Attorney-General of Pennsylvania," said Smith slowly, "is going into court to-morrow to ask for an injunction, alleging conspiracy and restraint of trade, forbidding the Eastern Conference from enforcing a separation rule anywhere within the boundaries of the state."

"What's that?" said the President, sharply. "A restraining order, you say?"

"Yes. Mr. Prior, the Attorney-General, thinks he will have little trouble in securing a temporary injunction. Later on he will move to make this permanent, and there will doubtless be a fight on that; but he thinks he can beat them under the new Anti-Trust Law. In the meantime it ties up the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh boards, and I think we can get back most of the smaller Pennsylvania agents we've lost.

Most of them are well disposed toward us; other things being equal, they'd be glad to restore the status quo, and none of them are anxious to be made joint defendants with the Conference companies in a conspiracy suit."

Mr. Wintermuth said nothing for a long minute; then his face broke into almost the first sincere smile which had been seen on it since the opening of the year.

"That's very well done--a good idea and well executed, Richard," he said.