At this Mr. Sluss, now completely in tow of his principal weakness, capitulated. “I will,” he said, “I surely will. And that sooner than you expect, perhaps. You must let me know how you are getting along.”
He took her hand. She held his quite warmly. “Now I’ll hold you to your promise,” she gurgled, in a throaty, coaxing way. A few days later he encountered her at lunchtime in his hall, where she had been literally lying in wait for him in order to repeat her invitation. Then he came.
The holdover employees who worked about the City Hall in connection with the mayor’s office were hereafter instructed to note as witnesses the times of arrival and departure of Mrs. Brandon and Mr. Sluss. A note that he wrote to Mrs. Brandon was carefully treasured, and sufficient evidence as to their presence at hotels and restaurants was garnered to make out a damaging case. The whole affair took about four months; then Mrs. Brandon suddenly received an offer to return to Washington, and decided to depart. The letters that followed her were a part of the data that was finally assembled in Mr. Stimson’s office to be used against Mr. Sluss in case he became too obstreperous in his opposition to Cowperwood.
In the meantime the organization which Mr. Gilgan had planned with Mr. Tiernan, Mr. Kerrigan, and Mr. Edstrom was encountering what might be called rough sledding. It was discovered that, owing to the temperaments of some of the new aldermen, and to the self-righteous attitude of their political sponsors, no franchises of any kind were to be passed unless they had the moral approval of such men as Hand, Sluss, and the other reformers; above all, no money of any kind was to be paid to anybody for anything.
“Whaddye think of those damn four-flushers and come-ons, anyhow?” inquired Mr. Kerrigan of Mr. Tiernan, shortly subsequent to a conference with Gilgan, from which Tiernan had been unavoidably absent. “They’ve got an ordinance drawn up covering the whole city in an elevated-road scheme, and there ain’t anything in it for anybody. Say, whaddye think they think we are, anyhow? Hey?”
Mr. Tiernan himself, after his own conference with Edstrom, had been busy getting the lay of the land, as he termed it; and his investigations led him to believe that a certain alderman by the name of Klemm, a clever and very respectable German-American from the North Side, was to be the leader of the Republicans in council, and that he and some ten or twelve others were determined, because of moral principles alone, that only honest measures should be passed. It was staggering.
At this news Mr. Kerrigan, who had been calculating on a number of thousands of dollars for his vote on various occasions, stared incredulously. “Well, I’ll be damned!” he commented. “They’ve got a nerve! What?”
“I’ve been talking to this fellow Klemm of the twentieth,” said Mr. Tiernan, sardonically. “Say, he’s a real one! I met him over at the Tremont talkin’ to Hvranek. He shakes hands like a dead fish. Whaddye think he had the nerve to say to me. ‘This isn’t the Mr. Tiernan of the second?’ he says.
“ ‘I’m the same,’ says I.
“ ‘Well, you don’t look as savage as I thought you did,’ says he. Haw-haw! I felt like sayin’, ‘If you don’t go way I’ll give you a slight tap on the wrist.’ I’d like just one pass at a stiff like that up a dark alley.” (Mr. Tiernan almost groaned in anguish.) “And then he begins to say he doesn’t see how there can be any reasonable objection to allowin’ various new companies to enter the streetcar field. ‘It’s sufficiently clear,’ he says, ‘that the public is against monopolies in any form.’ ” (Mr. Tiernan was mocking Mr. Klemm’s voice and language.) “My eye!” he concluded, sententiously. “Wait till he tries to throw that dope into Gumble and Pinski and Schlumbohm—haw, haw, haw!”
Mr. Kerrigan, at the thought of these hearty aldermen accustomed to all the perquisites of graft and rake-off, leaned back and gave vent to a burst of deep-chested laughter. “I’ll tell you what it is, Mike,” he said, archly, hitching up his tight, very artistic, and almost English trousers, “we’re up against a bunch of pikers in this Gilgan crowd, and they’ve gotta be taught a lesson. He knows it as well as anybody else. None o’ that Christian con game goes around where I am. I believe this man Cowperwood’s right when he says them fellows are a bunch of soreheads and jealous. If Cowperwood’s willing to put down good hard money to keep ’em out of his game, let them do as much to stay in it. This ain’t no charity grab-bag. We ought to be able to round up enough of these new fellows to make Schryhart and MacDonald come down good and plenty for what they want. From what Gilgan said all along, I thought he was dealing with live ones. They paid to win the election. Now let ’em pay to pull off a swell franchise if they want it, eh?”
“You’re damn right,” echoed Tiernan. “I’m with you to a T.”
It was not long after this conversation that Mr. Truman Leslie MacDonald, acting through Alderman Klemm, proceeded to make a count of noses, and found to his astonishment that he was not as strong as he had thought he was. Political loyalty is such a fickle thing. A number of aldermen with curious names—Horback, Fogarty, McGrane, Sumulsky—showed signs of being tampered with. He hurried at once to Messrs. Hand, Schryhart, and Arneel with this disconcerting information. They had been congratulating themselves that the recent victory, if it resulted in nothing else, would at least produce a blanket “L” road franchise, and that this would be sufficient to bring Cowperwood to his knees.
Upon receiving MacDonald’s message Hand sent at once for Gilgan.
