Once more an announcement from the butler, and now Mr. and Mrs. Addison entered. Addison was not at all concerned over coming here—liked the idea of it; his own position and that of his wife in Chicago was secure. “How are you, Cowperwood?” he beamed, laying one hand on the latter’s shoulder. “This is fine of you to have us in to-night. Mrs. Cowperwood, I’ve been telling your husband for nearly a year now that he should bring you out here. Did he tell you?” (Addison had not as yet confided to his wife the true history of Cowperwood and Aileen.)
“Yes, indeed,” replied Aileen, gaily, feeling that Addison was charmed by her beauty. “I’ve been wanting to come, too. It’s his fault that I wasn’t here sooner.”
Addison, looking circumspectly at Aileen, said to himself that she was certainly a stunning-looking woman. So she was the cause of the first wife’s suit. No wonder. What a splendid creature! He contrasted her with Mrs. Addison, and to his wife’s disadvantage. She had never been as striking, as stand-upish as Aileen, though possibly she might have more sense. Jove! if he could find a woman like Aileen to-day. Life would take on a new luster. And yet he had women—very carefully, very subterraneously. But he had them.
“It’s such a pleasure to meet you,” Mrs. Addison, a corpulent, bejeweled lady, was saying to Aileen. “My husband and yours have become the best of friends, apparently. We must see more of each other.”
She babbled on in a puffy social way, and Aileen felt as though she were getting along swiftly. The butler brought in a great tray of appetizers and cordials, and put them softly on a remote table. Dinner was served, and the talk flowed on; they discussed the growth of the city, a new church that Lord was building ten blocks farther out; Rambaud told about some humorous land swindles. It was quite gay. Meanwhile Aileen did her best to become interested in Mrs. Rambaud and Mrs. Addison. She liked the latter somewhat better, solely because it was a little easier to talk to her. Mrs. Rambaud Aileen knew to be the wiser and more charitable woman, but she frightened her a little; presently she had to fall back on Mr. Lord’s help. He came to her rescue gallantly, talking of everything that came into his mind. All the men outside of Cowperwood were thinking how splendid Aileen was physically, how white were her arms, how rounded her neck and shoulders, how rich her hair.
Chapter VII.
Chicago Gas
Old Peter Laughlin, rejuvenated by Cowperwood’s electric ideas, was making money for the house. He brought many bits of interesting gossip from the floor, and such shrewd guesses as to what certain groups and individuals were up to, that Cowperwood was able to make some very brilliant deductions.
“By Gosh! Frank, I think I know exactly what them fellers are trying to do,” Laughlin would frequently remark of a morning, after he had lain in his lonely Harrison Street bed meditating the major portion of the night. “That there Stock Yards gang” (and by gang he meant most of the great manipulators, like Arneel, Hand, Schryhart and others) “are after corn again. We want to git long o’ that now, or I miss my guess. What do you think, huh?”
Cowperwood, schooled by now in many Western subtleties which he had not previously known, and daily becoming wiser, would as a rule give an instantaneous decision.
“You’re right. Risk a hundred thousand bushels. I think New York Central is going to drop a point or two in a few days. We’d better go short a point.”
Laughlin could never figure out quite how it was that Cowperwood always seemed to know and was ready to act quite as quickly in local matters as he was himself. He understood his wisdom concerning Eastern shares and things dealt in on the Eastern exchange, but these Chicago matters?
“Whut makes you think that?” he asked Cowperwood, one day, quite curiously.
“Why, Peter,” Cowperwood replied, quite simply, “Anton Videra” (one of the directors of the Wheat and Corn Bank) “was in here yesterday while you were on ’change, and he was telling me.” He described a situation which Videra had outlined.
Laughlin knew Videra as a strong, wealthy Pole who had come up in the last few years. It was strange how Cowperwood naturally got in with these wealthy men and won their confidence so quickly. Videra would never have become so confidential with him.
“Huh!” he exclaimed. “Well, if he says it it’s more’n likely so.”
So Laughlin bought, and Peter Laughlin & Co. won.
But this grain and commission business, while it was yielding a profit which would average about twenty thousand a year to each partner, was nothing more to Cowperwood than a source of information.
He wanted to “get in” on something that was sure to bring very great returns within a reasonable time and that would not leave him in any such desperate situation as he was at the time of the Chicago fire—spread out very thin, as he put it. He had interested in his ventures a small group of Chicago men who were watching him—Judah Addison, Alexander Rambaud, Millard Bailey, Anton Videra—men who, although not supreme figures by any means, had free capital. He knew that he could go to them with any truly sound proposition. The one thing that most attracted his attention was the Chicago gas situation, because there was a chance to step in almost unheralded in an as yet unoccupied territory; with franchises once secured—the reader can quite imagine how—he could present himself, like a Hamilcar Barca in the heart of Spain or a Hannibal at the gates of Rome, with a demand for surrender and a division of spoils.
There were at this time three gas companies operating in the three different divisions of the city—the three sections, or “sides,” as they were called—South, West, and North, and of these the Chicago Gas, Light, and Coke Company, organized in 1848 to do business on the South Side, was the most flourishing and important. The People’s Gas, Light, and Coke Company, doing business on the West Side, was a few years younger than the South Chicago company, and had been allowed to spring into existence through the foolish self-confidence of the organizer and directors of the South Side company, who had fancied that neither the West Side nor the North Side was going to develop very rapidly for a number of years to come, and had counted on the city council’s allowing them to extend their mains at any time to these other portions of the city. A third company, the North Chicago Gas Illuminating Company, had been organized almost simultaneously with the West Side company by the same process through which the other companies had been brought into life—their avowed intention, like that of the West Side company, being to confine their activities to the sections from which the organizers presumably came.
Cowperwood’s first project was to buy out and combine the three old city companies. With this in view he looked up the holders in all three corporations—their financial and social status. It was his idea that by offering them three for one, or even four for one, for every dollar represented by the market value of their stock he might buy in and capitalize the three companies as one. Then, by issuing sufficient stock to cover all his obligations, he would reap a rich harvest and at the same time leave himself in charge. He approached Judah Addison first as the most available man to help float a scheme of this kind. He did not want him as a partner so much as he wanted him as an investor.
“Well, I’ll tell you how I feel about this,” said Addison, finally. “You’ve hit on a great idea here. It’s a wonder it hasn’t occurred to some one else before. And you’ll want to keep rather quiet about it, or some one else will rush in and do it. We have a lot of venturesome men out here. But I like you, and I’m with you. Now it wouldn’t be advisable for me to go in on this personally—not openly, anyhow—but I’ll promise to see that you get some of the money you want. I like your idea of a central holding company, or pool, with you in charge as trustee, and I’m perfectly willing that you should manage it, for I think you can do it. Anyhow, that leaves me out, apparently, except as an Investor. But you will have to get two or three others to help carry this guarantee with me. Have you any one in mind?”