“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.