There is a sort of municipal pride latent in the bosoms of most members of a really thriving community which often comes to the surface under the most trying circumstances. These four men were by no means an exception to this rule. Messrs. Schryhart, Hand, Arneel, and Merrill were concerned as to the good name of Chicago and their united standing in the eyes of Eastern financiers. It was a sad blow to them to think that the one great enterprise they had recently engineered—a foil to some of the immense affairs which had recently had their genesis in New York and elsewhere—should have come to so untimely an end. Chicago finance really should not be put to shame in this fashion if it could be avoided. So that when Mr. Schryhart arrived, quite warm and disturbed, and related in detail what he had just learned, his friends listened to him with eager and wary ears.
It was now between five and six o’clock in the afternoon and still blazing outside, though the walls of the buildings on the opposite side of the street were a cool gray, picked out with pools of black shadow. A newsboy’s strident voice was heard here and there calling an extra, mingled with the sound of homing feet and streetcars—Cowperwood’s streetcars.
“I’ll tell you what it is,” said Schryhart, finally. “It seems to me we have stood just about enough of this man’s beggarly interference. I’ll admit that neither Hull nor Stackpole had any right to go to him. They laid themselves and us open to just such a trick as has been worked in this case.” Mr. Schryhart was righteously incisive, cold, immaculate, waspish. “At the same time,” he continued, “any other moneyed man of equal standing with ourselves would have had the courtesy to confer with us and give us, or at least our banks, an opportunity for taking over these securities. He would have come to our aid for Chicago’s sake. He had no occasion for throwing these stocks on the market, considering the state of things. He knows very well what the effect of their failure will be. The whole city is involved, but it’s little he cares. Mr. Stackpole tells me that he had an express understanding with him, or, rather, with the men who it is plain have been representing him, that not a single share of this stock was to be thrown on the market. As it is, I venture to say not a single share of it is to be found anywhere in any of their safes. I can sympathize to a certain extent with poor Stackpole. His position, of course, was very trying. But there is no excuse—none in the world—for such a stroke of trickery on Cowperwood’s part. It’s just as we’ve known all along—the man is nothing but a wrecker. We certainly ought to find some method of ending his career here if possible.”
Mr. Schryhart kicked out his well-rounded legs, adjusted his soft-roll collar, and smoothed his short, crisp, wiry, now blackish-gray mustache. His black eyes flashed an undying hate.
At this point Mr. Arneel, with a cogency of reasoning which did not at the moment appear on the surface, inquired: “Do any of you happen to know anything in particular about the state of Mr. Cowperwood’s finances at present? Of course we know of the Lake Street ‘L’ and the Northwestern. I hear he’s building a house in New York, and I presume that’s drawing on him somewhat. I know he has four hundred thousand dollars in loans from the Chicago Central; but what else has he?”
“Well, there’s the two hundred thousand he owes the Prairie National,” piped up Schrybart, promptly. “From time to time I’ve heard of several other sums that escape my mind just now.”
Mr. Merrill, a diplomatic mouse of a man—gray, Parisian, dandified—was twisting in his large chair, surveying the others with shrewd though somewhat propitiatory eyes. In spite of his old grudge against Cowperwood because of the latter’s refusal to favor him in the matter of running streetcar lines past his store, he had always been interested in the man as a spectacle. He really disliked the thought of plotting to injure Cowperwood. Just the same, he felt it incumbent to play his part in such a council as this. “My financial agent, Mr. Hill, loaned him several hundred thousand not long ago,” he volunteered, a little doubtfully. “I presume he has many other outstanding obligations.”
Mr. Hand stirred irritably.
“Well, he’s owing the Third National and the Lake City as much if not more,” he commented. “I know where there are five hundred thousand dollars of his loans that haven’t been mentioned here. Colonel Ballinger has two hundred thousand. He must owe Anthony Ewer all of that. He owes the
