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"Keep your clothes on, and don't accuse a man of disloyalty until you have all the documents in the case," he said. "I didn't know, until I saw your bulletin a few hours ago, that the thing had been pulled off. In fact, I've been too busy with other things to pay much attention to the Belmount end of it." "The ded-devil you have!" sputtered Hildreth, chewing savagely on the gift cigar.
Portia gave him Elinor to take out, and he would have rejoiced brazenly if the table talk, from the bouillon to the ices, had not been persistently general, turning most naturally upon the Universal Oil Company's successful coup in the Belmount field.
"Not too fast, Hildreth," he cautioned, dropping into the editor's den late one night. "You are doing mighty good work, but you are making it infinitely harder for me driving the game to deeper cover. One of my men had a clue: Bucks and Meigs were holding conferences with a man from the Belmount field whose record runs back to New York. But they have taken the alarm and thrown us off the track."
Meigs, there is nothing to be gained by indirection. May I ask you to come to the point?" "Briefly, then: the course pursued by Senator Duvall in the Belmount affair leaves an unproved charge against others; a charge which I am determined to sift to the bottom you see, I am speaking quite frankly.
Of course, it's an open secret that the Universal people are trying to break through the fence of the new law and establish themselves in the Belmount field without losing their identity or any of their monopolistic privileges. And it is equally a matter of course to some of us that the Bucks ring will sell the State out if the price is right.
Then, suddenly: "Have you been paying any attention to the development of the Belmount oil field?" "Enough to know that it is a big thing; the biggest since the Pennsylvania discoveries, according to all accounts." "And the people of the State are enthusiastic about it, thinking that now the long tyranny of the oil monopoly will be broken?"
"In the present state of affairs with the People's Party as yet on trial, and the public mind ready to take fire at the merest hint of a foreign capitalistic monopoly in the State tell me what would happen to the man who would let the Universal Oil Company into the Belmount field in defiance of the new trust and corporation law?" "By Jove!"
After its incorporation it was ascertained that it not only held options on all the most valuable wells in the Belmount region, but that its charter gave it immunity from the law requiring all corporations to have their organizations, officers, and operating headquarters in the State.
The editor of the Belmount Refiner was the first to smell smoke and to raise the cry of "Fire!" but by midnight the wires were humming with the news and the entire State was ablaze. The story as it appeared under the scare headlines the next morning was crisply told. An oil company had been formed with Senator Duvall at its head.
Do it a little longer and I'll put you in the way of touching off a set-piece of pyrotechnics that will double discount this mild little snap-cracker of the Belmount business." "Can't you do it now?" "No; the time isn't ripe yet. We must let the Tribune's coat of whitewash dry in first." Hildreth wriggled in his chair.
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