"That needn't hamper you," said Mr. Foxman. "I'd a little rather you went at this thing with an open mind, anyhow. These clippings here"--he tapped one heap of them with his forefinger--"ought to give you a pretty clear idea of the situation in the past, if you'll read 'em through carefully. They'll show you that the Pearl Street line has been a sort of financial football for certain interests down in Wall Street for a good many years. The fellows behind it starved it to death and let the equipment run down while they juggled the paper and skinned the dear public." "I see," said Singlebury; "same old story--plenty of water for the road but no solid nourishment for the investors." "That's a good line," commended Mr. Foxman; "better save it up for your story and use it there. But it's not the same old story over again. At least this time there's a new twist to it. "Up until now the crowd that have been manipulating the stock stayed inside the law, no matter what else they may have done that was shady. But I have cause to believe that a new gang has stepped in--a gang headed by John W. Blake of the Blake Bank. You've heard of him, I guess?" Singlebury nodded. "It's been known for some time on the inside that the Blake outfit were figuring on a merger of some of the independent East Side surface lines--half a dozen scattered lines, more or less. There've been stories printed about this--we printed some of them ourselves. What hasn't been known was that they had their hooks into the Pearl Street line too. Poor outcast as it is, the Pearl Street line, with the proposed Pearl Street loop round Five Points--a charter was granted for that extension some time ago--will form the connecting link to the combination they're figuring on. And then on top of that there's the direct connection to be made with the new Brooklyn subway that's being built now. If you'll look at the map of the East Side lines you'll see for yourself how important it is for the group that intends to take control of the trolley lines on this side of the river and hopes to control the subway to the other side of the river that they should have the Pearl Street loop in their grip. With it they win; without it there's doubt of the success of their plan. "Well, that part of it is legitimate enough, I suppose. The common stock of the Pearl Street line has been shoved down and down and down, until to-day it touched twenty. And Blake's crowd on the quiet have been buying it in--freezing out the small stockholders as they went along, and knowing mighty good and well that the day they announced their merger the stock would go up with a jump--thirty or forty or fifty points maybe--and then they'd clean up. Well, I suppose that's legitimate too--at least it's recognised as regular on Wall Street, provided you can get away with it. But behind the scenes there's been some outright, downright, grand larceny going on and, along with that, legislative corruption too.