Page:The History of the Standard Oil Company Vol 1.djvu/149

Rh unruffled countenance with which he greeted them. Did not the man know when he was beaten? Did he not realise the opinion the Oil Regions held of him? His placid demeanour in the very teeth of their violence was disconcerting.

Not less of a shock was given the country by the knowledge that Mr. Rockefeller, Mr. Flagler, Mr. Waring and the other gentlemen in their party were pressing a new alliance, and that they claimed that their new scheme had none of the obnoxious features of the defunct South Improvement Company, though it was equally well adapted to work out the "good of the oil business."

For several days the visiting gentlemen slipped around, bland and smiling, from street corner to street corner, from office to office, explaining, expostulating, mollifying. "You misunderstand our intention," they told the refiners. "It is to save the business, not to destroy it, that we are come. You see the disorders competition has wrought in the oil industry. Let us see what combination will do. Let us make an experiment—that is all. If it does not work, then we can go back to the old method."

Although Mr. Rockefeller was everywhere, and heard everything in these days, he rarely talked. "I remember well how little he said," one of the most aggressively independent of the Titusville refiners told the writer. "One day several of us met at the office of one of the refiners, who, I felt pretty sure, was being persuaded to go into the scheme which they were talking up. Everybody talked except Mr. Rockefeller. He sat in a rocking-chair, softly swinging back and forth, his hands over his face. I got pretty excited when I saw how those South Improvement men were pulling the wool over our men's eyes, and making them believe we were all going to the dogs if there wasn't an immediate combination to put up the price of refined and prevent new people coming into