“You don’t need to tell me what this plan of reorganization is; because they wouldn’t propose one unless it was going to benefit them in some way, and the only way it can be made to benefit them is at the expense of the other stockholders. Quod erat demonstrandum.”

Mr. Tutt seemed to have become distended somehow and to have spread over the entire wall surface of his office like the genie which the fisherman innocently permitted to escape from the bottle.

“There isn’t one reorganization scheme in a hundred that isn’t crooked somewhere.”

“According to that, if a business is unsuccessful it ought to be allowed to go to pot for fear that somebody might make a profit in putting it on its feet,” she countered.  “I think you’re a violent, irascible, prejudiced old man!”

“All the same,” he retorted, “show me a reorganization scheme and I’ll show you a flimflam!  What’s this one?  Bet you anything you like it’s as crooked as a ram’s horn.  I don’t have to hear about it.  Don’t want to read the plan.  But I’ll bust it—­higher than Hades.  See if I don’t!”

He spat the remaining filaments of his stogy from the window and fished out another.

“How do we come into it, anyhow?” he demanded.

“Doctor—­I mean Mister Barrows,” replied Miss Wiggin.

“Oh, yes.  Of course.  Well, you send for him to come down here and sign the papers.”

“What papers?”

“The complaint and order to show cause.”

“But there isn’t any.”

“There will be, all right, by the time he gets here.”

Miss Wiggin looked first puzzled and then pained.

“I don’t understand,” she said rather stiffly.  “Do you mean that the firm of Tutt & Tutt is going to engage in the enterprise of trying to break up a plan of reorganization without knowing what it is?  Won’t you lay us all open to the accusation of being strikers?”

Mr. Tutt’s ordinarily brown complexion became slightly tinged with purple.

“Let the court decide!” he cried hotly.  “You say Scherer, Hunn, Greenbaum & Beck are proposing to reorganize a mining company?  You admit we hold some of the stock?  Well—­as the natural-born and perennial champion of the outraged minority—­I’m going to attack it, and bust it, and raise heck with it—­on general principles.  I’m going to throw that damned old hat of mine into the ring, my child, and play hell with everything.”

And with a cluck Mr. Tutt leaned over, produced a dingy bottle wrapped in a coat of many colors and poured himself out a glass of malt extract.

* * * * *

When Mr. Greenbaum was summoned to the telephone and informed by Mr. Elderberry in disgruntled tones that somebody had just served upon him an order to show cause why the proposed reorganization of Horse’s Neck should not be set aside and enjoined, he not only became instantly annoyed but highly excited.