Page:The achievements of Luther Trant - Balmer and MacHarg - 1910.djvu/208

180 steal systematically from the United States Government for—probably the last ten years. We have uncovered the means by which your company checker at scale No. 3, which, because of its position, probably weighs more cargoes than all the other scales together, has been lessening the apparent weights upon which you pay duties."

"Cheating here under my direction?" Welter now bellowed indignantly. "What are you talking about? Rowan, what is he talking about?" he demanded, boldly, of the dock superintendent; but the cadaverous little man was unable to brazen it out with him.

"You need not have looked at your dock superintendent just then, Mr. Welter, to see if he would stand the racket when the trouble comes, for which you have been paying him enough on the side to keep him in electric motors and marble statuettes. And you cannot try now to disown this crime with the regular president-of-corporation excuse, Mr. Welter, that you never knew of it, that it was all done without your knowledge by a subordinate to make a showing in his department; and do not expect, either, to escape so easily your certain complicity in the murder of Landers, to prevent him from exposing your scheme and—since even the American Commodities Company scarcely dared to have two 'accidental deaths' of checkers in the same month—the shanghaiing of Morse later."

"My complicity in the death of Landers and the disappearance of Morse?" Welter roared.

"I said the murder of Landers," Trant corrected. "For when Rentland and Dickey tell to-morrow before the grand jury how Landers was about to