awal of all
foreign capital from the State, while the other, large and complacent,
pointed eloquently to the beneficent working of the law under which the
cause of a poor woman, suing for her undoubted right, might be made the
whip to flog corporate tyranny into instant subjection.

As for the dispossessed stock-holders in the far-away East, they were slow
to take the alarm, and still slower to get concerted action. Like many of
the western roads, the Western Pacific had been capitalized largely by
popular subscription; hence there was no single holder, or group of
holders, of sufficient financial weight to enter the field against the
spoilers.

But when Loring and his associates had fairly got the wires hot with the
tale of what had been done, and the much more alarming tale of what was
likely to be done, the Boston inertness vanished. A pool of the stock was
formed, with the members of the Advisory Board as a nucleus; money was
subscribed, and no less a legal light than an ex-attorney-general of the
state of Massachusetts was despatched to the seat of war to advise with
the men on the ground. None the less, disaster out-travels the swiftest of
"limited" trains. Before the heavily-feed consulting attorney had crossed
the Hudson in his westward journey, Wall Street had taken notice, and
there was a momentary splash in the troubled pool of the Stock Exchange
and a vanishing circle of ripples to show where Western Pacific had gone
down.

In the meantime Major James Guilford, somewhile president of the Apache
National Bank of Gaston, and antecedent to that the frowning autocrat of a
twenty-five-mile logging road in the North Carolina mountains, had given
bond in some sort and had taken possession of the company's property and
of the offices in the Quintard Building.

His first official act as receiver was to ask for the resignations of a
dozen heads of departments, beginning with the general manager and pausing
for the moment with the supervisor of track. That done, he filled the
vacancies with political troughsmen; and with these as assistant
decapitators the major passed rapidly down the line, striking off heads in
daily batches until the over-flow of the Bucks political following was
provided for on the railroad's pay-rolls to the wife's cousin's nephew.

This was the work of the first few administrative days or weeks, and while
it was going on, the business attitude of the road remained unchanged. But
once seated