“I certainly do, Mr. Haguenin,” returned Cowperwood, emphatically, in answer to his query. “Personally, I should think Chicago would be glad to pay a bonus to get its street-railway service straightened out, especially where a corporation comes forward with a liberal, conservative programme such as this. It means millions in growth of property values on the North Side. It means millions to the business heart to have this loop system laid down just as I suggest.”
He put his finger firmly on the map which he had brought, and Haguenin agreed with him that the plan was undoubtedly a sound business proposition. “Personally, I should be the last to complain,” he added, “for the line passes my door. At the same time this tunnel, as I understand it, cost in the neighborhood of eight hundred thousand or a million dollars. It is a delicate problem. I should like to know what the other editors think of it, and how the city council itself would feel toward it.”
Cowperwood nodded. “Certainly, certainly,” he said. “With pleasure. I would not come here at all if I did not feel that I had a perfectly legitimate proposition—one that the press of the city should unite in supporting. Where a corporation such as ours is facing large expenditures, which have to be financed by outside capital, it is only natural that we should wish to allay useless, groundless opposition in advance. I hope we may command your support.”
“I hope you may,” smiled Mr. Haguenin. They parted the best of friends.
The other publishers, guardians of the city’s privileges, were not quite so genial as Haguenin in their approval of Cowperwood’s proposition. The use of a tunnel and several of the most important downtown streets might readily be essential to the development of Cowperwood’s North Side schemes, but the gift of them was a different matter. Already, as a matter of fact, the various publishers and editors had been consulted by Schryhart, Merrill, and others with a view to discovering how they felt as to this new venture, and whether Cowperwood would be cheerfully endorsed or not. Schryhart, smarting from the wounds he had received in the gas war, viewed this new activity on Cowperwood’s part with a suspicious and envious eye. To him much more than to the others it spelled a new and dangerous foe in the street-railway field, although all the leading citizens of Chicago were interested.
“I suppose now,” he said one evening to the Hon. Walter Melville Hyssop, editor and publisher of the Transcript and the Evening Mail, whom he met at the Union League, “that this fellow Cowperwood will attempt some disturbing coup in connection with street-railway affairs. He is just the sort. I think, from an editorial point of view, his political connections will bear watching.” Already there were rumors abroad that McKenty might have something to do with the new company.
Hyssop, a medium-sized, ornate, conservative person, was not so sure. “We shall find out soon enough, no doubt, what propositions Mr. Cowperwood has in hand,” he remarked. “He is very energetic and capable, as I understand it.”
Hyssop and Schryhart, as well as the latter and Merrill, had been social friends for years and years.
After his call on Mr. Haguenin, Cowperwood’s naturally selective and self-protective judgment led him next to the office of the Inquirer, old General MacDonald’s paper, where he found that because of rhuematism and the severe, inclement weather of Chicago, the old General had sailed only a few days before for Italy. His son, an aggressive, mercantile type of youth of thirty-two, and a managing editor by the name of Du Bois were acting in his stead. In the son, Truman Leslie MacDonald, an intense, calm, and penetrating young man, Cowperwood encountered someone who, like himself, saw life only from the point of view of sharp, self-centered, personal advantage. What was he, Truman Leslie MacDonald, to derive from any given situation, and how was he to make the Inquirer an even greater property than it had been under his father before him? He did not propose to be overwhelmed by the old General’s rather flowery reputation. At the same time he meant to become imposingly rich. An active member of a young and very smart set which had been growing up on the North Side, he rode, drove, was instrumental in organizing a new and exclusive country club, and despised the rank and file as unsuited to the fine atmosphere to which he aspired. Mr. Clifford Du Bois, the managing editor, was a cool reprobate of forty, masquerading as a gentleman, and using the Inquirer in subtle ways for furthering his personal ends, and that under the old General’s very nose. He was osseous, sandy-haired, blue-eyed, with a keen, formidable nose and a solid chin. Clifford Du Bois was always careful never to let his left hand know what his right hand did.
It was this sapient pair that received Cowperwood in the old General’s absence, first in Mr. Du Bois’s room and then in that of Mr. MacDonald. The latter had already heard much of Cowperwood’s doings. Men who had been connected with the old gas war—Jordan Jules, for instance, president of the old North Chicago Gas Company, and Hudson Baker, president of the old West Chicago Gas Company—had denounced him long before as a bucaneer who had pirated them out of very comfortable sinecures. Here he was now invading the North Chicago street-railway field and coming with startling schemes for the reorganization of the downtown business heart. Why shouldn’t the city have something in return; or, better yet, those who helped to formulate the public
