Meanwhile we had gone our way, making ready to turn over our properties, rounding up this matter and that, guarding against the tight money market, and quietly getting things in order for putting out our securities. Then one day had come, like a thunderbolt from an open sky, an injunction, restraining the American Meat Products Company from taking over the properties of the London and Chicago Company, the petitioners alleging that they held bonds of the latter concern, and that the sale of its properties to the representatives of the American Meat Products Company had been tainted with fraud. A Judge Garretson, of the Circuit Court, had granted the temporary injunction one night at his house, and the argument for the permanent decree was set for April 10, a fortnight later. The names of the petitioners, all but Frost's, were unknown to us. "There is the trail of the snake!" Slocum muttered when he had read the injunction. "We had better find Lokes. This will be in the papers to-night, and in the Eastern papers to-morrow morning--you will hear from it all over." Sure enough, the next noon I had a telegram from Farson in Boston:-- "Papers print injunction A.M.P. Co.; charge fraud. Wire explanation." "Cousin John didn't let the grass grow under him," Slocum grimly remarked when I handed him this telegram at luncheon. "You had better let me answer him. Now for Lokes: he denies all knowledge, and it's plain enough that he isn't interested in having this matter aired. But some one must have found out pretty accurately what has happened. Perhaps Lokes when he was drunk let out what he had got from us. Anyhow, it's blackmail, and the question is what are we going to do about it. It will cost us a pretty penny to settle now!" The situation was alarming. Unless we could get that injunction dissolved, and speedily, our project faced serious danger. The banker Farson's telegram was only the first. The banks and our backers East and West would soon call us to account. "It _is_ blackmail," I said to Slocum, "and if there is a way out we will not pay those rats. Find out what you can about them." In a day or two he came over to me with the information he had obtained. The "syndicate" consisted of three or four cheap fellows, hangers-on of a broker's office. One of them happened to be a relative of Judge Garretson, who had issued the midnight injunction. "I got that last from Ed Hostetter," Slocum explained. "I met him on the street as I was coming over here. Having heard that this Lucas Smith lived out Ed's way, in May Park, I asked him if he knew anything about the man. He said at once: 'You mean the jedge's brother-in-law? He's a political feller.' Of course this Smith is a bum like the rest." So we had in Ed, who had come back to work for me, having failed in a market where I had started him after the sausage plant was sold.