lifetime, I will never face him and give him my word for one thing and mean another," and in the years after when we did millions upon millions of business, with only each other's word for a bond of fair treatment, not once did I depart from the letter of my resolution. Up to the recent famous "Gas Trial," where our roads suddenly shot off at right angles, owing to a foul act of perjury, Henry H. Rogers never tired of meeting all his associates' attacks upon me with: "Lawson's word is gospel truth for me."
When we dropped our eyes, both evidently satisfied, he said: "Now, what have you to say to me?"
I spoke my piece rapidly and without interruption: "There are four things possible, as I wrote you—only four. I will take up the fourth first. I have absolute power to speak for all our local companies. If we, you and I, come to no settlement by to-morrow night, I will, without warning to any one, confess a default to the notes of our different companies and have a receiver appointed. As our stocks and bonds are held by our best investors all over New England, and as no such move is suspected, there will be a terrific rumpus. In the crash I shall go down with Addicks and the rest, for we have all put our personal resources behind the enterprise. I will see that the howl following the crash shall be such as all must hear, and I will call attention to the illegal acts of every one—your companies, Addicks' companies, and the city and State officials that have made such conditions possible. I don't think you will be able to stand against the cyclone this crash will raise; but even if you do, the receiver, having no interest to pay on bonds, will be in a position to smash the price of gas to seventy or seventy-five cents, and make it impossible for you to get possession of our companies for so long a time that the consumers will never allow you to get the price back to a profitable one. Have I made it clear that you cannot, as you were counting on doing, continue this fight till you have us tired out and crushed?"