There was only one important member in Pennsylvania of the oil combination who could be caught with a subpoena. At his first appearance in court, on the witness stand, he took lofty ground. "I decline to answer."[154] Put on the stand again, he was asked: "Were you allowed a rebate amounting to 64-1/2 cents per barrel?" "No, sir; not to my knowledge."[155] Put on the third time and compelled to produce his books, he had to read aloud in court the entries showing the payment he had thus denied under oath. "There was a total allowance of 64-1/2 cents per barrel."[156] And then he shut up again--but too late; and to all other questions about his rebates said, gloomily, "I decline to answer." When the president of the oil trust was asked afterwards by the New York Legislature if some company or companies embraced within it had not enjoyed from railroads more favorable freight rates than outside refineries, he replied: "I do not recall anything of that kind." "You have heard of such things?" "I have heard much in the papers about it."[157] But at the time these rates were being made, one of his principal associates admitted that the president was the person who attended to the freight rates.[158] This was also put beyond a doubt in the Ohio investigation by the evidence of his first partner in the little oil refinery at Cleveland which had grown so great, he who had furnished the only mechanical and refining knowledge it had started with, and who had, until within a year, been a fellow-stockholder and director. "Do these contracts contain anything of the nature that would discriminate against the small refiners of the State?" "I think they did.... Up to the time I left the company the open rate was $1.40 to the seaboard. They"--the oil combination--"ship for 80 cents.... The president told me it was the rate at that time."[159] With every known avenue to the sea thus closed to them it certainly looked as if all was up with the "outsiders." But the men, who had too much American spunk to buy peace with dishonor by consenting to a "fix-up" under compulsion, had the wit to find out a loop-hole of temporary escape. They built tank boats for the canal, and thus succeeded in getting 200,000 barrels of oil to New York that summer before the canal closed.[160] Since then all chance of escape by the canal has been cut off. The railroads made a war of freight rates against it, and the only canal that connected the oil regions with the Erie canal route to the sea was dried up, and turned into a way for a railroad by a special act of the New York Legislature. The railroad so built has ever since been managed as one of the most diligent promoters of the policy of excluding the common people from the oil business.