Hitherto Addicks had used the proxies to elect himself president of each of the subordinate corporations, drawing the several salaries which went with the offices. To prevail on him to give up these places and their emoluments to a man he hated as bitterly as he did Matthews was a difficult task, but his situation was desperate. Finally, he agreed. I did not know till long afterward that this reluctant compliance was yielded only after Addicks had had a secret session with his Bay State directors, at which they voted him, by way of salve for his resignation, a sum equal to three years' salary, $75,000.
The mayor, who was a lawyer, prided himself on his shrewdness, and was fully alive to the serpent strategy of Addicks. He determined that the prize he had secured should not slip through his fingers for lack of precaution. We had many legal pow-wows in which the most astute lawyers at the Boston bar were called in, and finally the directors of the Bay State made an iron-clad contract with Nathan Matthews, agreeing to deliver over to him whatever proxies it, the Bay State Gas of Delaware, received from the Mercantile Trust Company of New York, on a given day before the annual election, with which he, of course, could elect himself president. This contract was signed by Addicks and his directors and by all the officers of the Bay State of Delaware corporation, and was passed on and approved by the eminent law sharps both sides had retained.
A few days after the document that made Nathan Matthews supreme boss of Boston Gas was conveyed to him, there came an explosion. Like the premature bursting of a bombshell at a Fourth of July celebration, the transaction "leaked," and the press announced in sable head-lines that Mayor Matthews had sold out, that Addicks was on top, and that Rogers and "Standard Oil" would surely be found beneath the débris. Matthews has always claimed that this "leakage" was a piece of Addicks' double dealing; Addicks declares it was a part of Matthews' and Rogers' deep-laid plan to give him the double cross. Anyway, as a hurrier-up of coming events