Braman with that
inevitable question of all such "sit-downs": "What's the price?" And
Braman as plumply and bluntly answered: "Buchanan, Foster's client, must
have the face of his bonds and interest, $150,000, and we must have at
least $150,000 for our trouble and expense."

My long experience in corporation affairs, and my intimate knowledge of
the practices which the "System" with its votaries has made habitual was
such that I was proof against shock from anything that could possibly
turn up in even extraordinary financial deals, but I was just a bit
staggered by the business-like way Braman demanded for himself and
Foster $150,000 and the coolness with which he further explained that
they must divide their share with certain influential persons without
whose hearty cooperation the tangling-up which had been so cleverly
accomplished would have been impossible. He made no bones of showing me
that once "we gave up" it would only be a matter of the number of
minutes required to get details fixed before everything would be as it
was before he had interfered. I dwelt upon the possibilities of the
judge not following orders to the letter and the minute, but he only
smiled and answered: "Leave all that to us; if we don't make good as
agreed, we get no pay." He was fully alive to the dangers of the game,
and he impressed upon me he would take nobody's word for anything. With
him and Foster nothing but money talked, and it must not be of the
marked-bill kind either, meaning he would not take anything which could
be tied up by injunctions and lawsuits after the receiver had been
dismissed. However, he would play fair. He would not ask us to pay on
anything but the actual delivery of the goods. He also frankly told me
that he had named the very low figure, $150,000, because he expected to
invest what he received in Bay State Gas stock at $3 and, upon its
jumping to $10 or $20, to make half a million.

But this is outrageous, you say. You call the performance I have
described by hard names! Surely our courts are not also the creatures of
"frenzied finance"? you ask. I warn my readers that this narrative is no
more than a record of events occurring within my own knowledge, and that
dark and vicious as the pictures seem they are photographs of actual
happenings. Nor should the public conclude that the dishonor and
dishonesty revealed in connection with Bay State Gas are exceptional. On
the contrary, such doings are the rule in th