“You know as well as I do, Hugh, how this thing is being manipulated,” he declared at Tom's one Sunday evening; “there was nothing the matter with the Ribblevale Steel Company--it was as right as rain before Leonard Dickinson and Grierson and Scherer and that crowd you train with began to talk it down at the Club. Oh, they're very compassionate. I've heard 'em. Dickinson, privately, doesn't think much of Ribblevale paper, and Pugh” (the president of the Ribblevale) “seems worried and looks badly. It's all very clever, but I'd hate to tell you in plain words what I'd call it.” “Go ahead,” I challenged him audaciously. “You haven't any proof that the Ribblevale wasn't in trouble.” “I heard Mr. Pugh tell my father the other day it was a d--d outrage. He couldn't catch up with these rumours, and some of his stockholders were liquidating.” “You, don't suppose Pugh would want to admit his situation, do you?” I asked. “Pugh's a straight man,” retorted Perry. “That's more than I can say for any of the other gang, saving your presence. The unpleasant truth is that Scherer and the Boyne people want the Ribblevale, and you ought to know it if you don't.” He looked at me very hard through the glasses he had lately taken to wearing. Tom, who was lounging by the fire, shifted his position uneasily. I smiled, and took another cigar. “I believe Ralph is right, Perry, when he calls you a sentimentalist. For you there's a tragedy behind every ordinary business transaction. The Ribblevale people are having a hard time to keep their heads above water, and immediately you smell conspiracy. Dickinson and Scherer have been talking it down. How about it, Tom?” But Tom, in these debates, was inclined to be noncommittal, although it was clear they troubled him. “Oh, don't ask me, Hughie,” he said. “I suppose I ought to cultivate the scientific point of view, and look with impartial interest at this industrial cannibalism,” returned Perry, sarcastically. “Eat or be eaten that's what enlightened self-interest has come to. After all, Ralph would say, it is nature, the insect world over again, the victim duped and crippled before he is devoured, and the lawyer--how shall I put it?--facilitating the processes of swallowing and digesting....” There was no use arguing with Perry when he was in this vein.... Since I am not writing a technical treatise, I need not go into the details of the Ribblevale suit. Since it to say that the affair, after a while, came apparently to a deadlock, owing to the impossibility of getting certain definite information from the Ribblevale books, which had been taken out of the state. The treasurer, for reasons of his own, remained out of the state also; the ordinary course of summoning him before a magistrate in another state had naturally been resorted to, but the desired evidence was not forthcoming.