________________________________________________
_ When Cowperwood, after failing in his overtures to the three city
gas companies, confided to Addison his plan of organizing rival
companies in the suburbs, the banker glared at him appreciatively.
"You're a smart one!" he finally exclaimed. "You'll do! I back
you to win!" He went on to advise Cowperwood that he would need
the assistance of some of the strong men on the various village
councils. "They're all as crooked as eels' teeth," he went on.
"But there are one or two that are more crooked than others and
safer--bell-wethers. Have you got your lawyer?"
"I haven't picked one yet, but I will. I'm looking around for the
right man now.
"Well, of course, I needn't tell you how important that is. There
is one man, old General Van Sickle, who has had considerable
training in these matters. He's fairly reliable."
The entrance of Gen. Judson P. Van Sickle threw at the very outset
a suggestive light on the whole situation. The old soldier, over
fifty, had been a general of division during the Civil War, and
had got his real start in life by filing false titles to property
in southern Illinois, and then bringing suits to substantiate his
fraudulent claims before friendly associates. He was now a prosperous
go-between, requiring heavy retainers, and yet not over-prosperous.
There was only one kind of business that came to the General--this
kind; and one instinctively compared him to that decoy sheep at
the stock-yards that had been trained to go forth into nervous,
frightened flocks ofits fellow-sheep, balking at being driven into
the slaughtering-pens, and lead them peacefully into the shambles,
knowing enough always to make his own way quietly to the rear
during the onward progress and thus escape. A dusty old lawyer,
this, with Heaven knows what welter of altered wills, broken
promises, suborned juries, influenced judges, bribed councilmen and
legislators, double-intentioned agreements and contracts, and a
whole world of shifty legal calculations and false pretenses
floating around in his brain. Among the politicians, judges, and
lawyers generally, by reason of past useful services, he was
supposed to have some powerful connections. He liked to be called
into any case largely because it meant something to do and kept
him from being bored. When compelled to keep an appointment in
winter, he would slip on an old greatcoat of gray twill that he
had worn until it was shabby, then, taking down a soft felt hat,
twisted and pulled out of shape by use, he would pull it low over
his dull gray eyes and amble forth. In summer his clothes looked
as crinkled as though he had slept in them for weeks. He smoked.
In cast of countenance he was not wholly unlike General Grant,
with a short gray beard and mustache which always seemed more or
less unkempt and hair that hung down over his forehead in a gray
mass. The poor General! He was neither very happy nor very unhappy
--a doubting Thomas without faith or hope in humanity and without
any particular affection for anybody.
"I'll tell you how it is with these small councils, Mr. Cowperwood,"
observed Van Sickle, sagely, after the preliminaries of the first
interview had been dispensed with.
"They're worse than the city council almost, and that's about as
bad as it can be. You can't do anything without money where these
little fellows are concerned. I don't like to be too hard on men,
but these fellows--" He shook his head.
"I understand," commented Cowperwood. "They're not very pleasing,
even after you make all allowances."
"Most of them," went on the General, "won't stay put when you think
you have them. They sell out. They're just as apt as not to run
to this North Side Gas Company and tell them all about the whole
thing before you get well under way. Then you have to pay them
more money, rival bills will be introduced, and all that." The old
General pulled a long face. "Still, there are one or two of them
that are all right," he added, "if you can once get them interested
--Mr. Duniway and Mr. Gerecht."
"I'm not so much concerned with how it has to be done, General,"
suggested Cowperwood, amiably, "but I want to be sure that it will
be done quickly and quietly. I don't want to be bothered with
details. Can it be done without too much publicity, and about
what do you think it is going to cost?"
"Well, that's pretty hard to say until I look into the matter,"
said the General, thoughtfully. "It might cost only four and it
might cost all of forty thousand dollars--even more. I can't tell.
I'd like to take a little time and look into it." The old gentleman
was wondering how much Cowperwood was prepared to spend.
"Well, we won't bother about that now. I'm willing to be as liberal
as necessary. I've sent for Mr. Sippens, the president of the
Lake View Gas and Fuel Company, and he'll be here in a little
while. You will want to work with him as closely as you can. The
energetic Sippens came after a few moments, and he and Van Sickle,
after being instructed to be mutually helpful and to keep Cowperwood's
name out of all matters relating to this work, departed together.
They were an odd pair--the dusty old General phlegmatic,
disillusioned, useful, but not inclined to feel so; and the smart,
chipper Sippens, determined to wreak a kind of poetic vengeance
on his old-time enemy, the South Side Gas Company, via this seemingly
remote Northside conspiracy. In ten minutes they were hand in
glove, the General describing to Sippens the penurious and
unscrupulous brand of Councilman Duniway's politics and the friendly
but expensive character of Jacob Gerecht. Such is life.
In the organization of the Hyde Park company Cowperwood, because
he never cared to put all his eggs in one basket, decided to secure
a second lawyer and a second dummy president, although he proposed
to keep De Soto Sippens as general practical adviser for all three
or four companies. He was thinking this matter over when there
appeared on the scene a very much younger man than the old General,
one Kent Barrows McKibben, the only son of ex-Judge Marshall Scammon
McKibben, of the State Supreme Court. Kent McKibben was thirty-three
years old, tall, athletic, and, after a fashion, handsome. He was
not at all vague intellectually--that is, in the matter of the
conduct of his business--but dandified and at times remote. He
had an office in one of the best blocks in Dearborn Street, which
he reached in a reserved, speculative mood every morning at nine,
unless something important called him down-town earlier. It so
happened that he had drawn up the deeds and agreements for the
real-estate company that sold Cowperwood his lots at Thirty-seventh
Street and Michigan Avenue, and when they were ready he journeyed
to the latter's office to ask if there were any additional details
which Cowperwood might want to have taken into consideration. When
he was ushered in, Cowperwood turned to him his keen, analytical
eyes and saw at once a personality he liked. McKibben was just
remote and artistic enough to suit him. He liked his clothes, his
agnostic unreadableness, his social air. McKibben, on his part,
caught the significance of the superior financial atmosphere at
once. He noted Cowperwood's light-brown suit picked out with
strands of red, his maroon tie, and small cameo cuff-links. His
desk, glass-covered, looked clean and official. The woodwork of
the rooms was all cherry, hand-rubbed and oiled, the pictures
interesting steel-engravings of American life, appropriately framed.
The typewriter--at that time just introduced--was in evidence, and
the stock-ticker--also new--was ticking volubly the prices current.
The secretary who waited on Cowperwood was a young Polish girl
named Antoinette Nowak, reserved, seemingly astute, dark, and very
attractive.
"What sort of business is it you handle, Mr. McKibben?" asked
Cowperwood, quite casually, in the course of the conversation.
And after listening to McKibben's explanation he added, idly: "You
might come and see me some time next week. It is just possible
that I may have something in your line."
In another man McKibben would have resented this remote suggestion
of future aid. Now, instead, he was intensely pleased. The man
before him gripped his imagination. His remote intellectuality
relaxed. When he came again and Cowperwood indicated the nature
of the work he might wish to have done McKibben rose to the bait
like a fish to a fly.
"I wish you would let me undertake that, Mr. Cowperwood," he said,
quite eagerly. "It's something I've never done, but I'm satisfied
I can do it. I live out in Hyde Park and know most of the councilmen.
I can bring considerable influence to bear for you."
Cowperwood smiled pleasantly.
So a second company, officered by dummies of McKibben's selection,
was organized. De Soto Sippens, without old General Van Sickle's
knowledge, was taken in as practical adviser. An application for
a franchise was drawn up, and Kent Barrows McKibben began silent,
polite work on the South Side, coming into the confidence, by
degrees, of the various councilmen.
There was still a third lawyer, Burton Stimson, the youngest but
assuredly not the least able of the three, a pale, dark-haired
Romeoish youth with burning eyes, whom Cowperwood had encountered
doing some little work for Laughlin, and who was engaged to work
on the West Side with old Laughlin as ostensible organizer and the
sprightly De Soto Sippens as practical adviser. Stimson was no
mooning Romeo, however, but an eager, incisive soul, born very
poor, eager to advance himself. Cowperwood detected that pliability
of intellect which, while it might spell disaster to some, spelled
success for him. He wanted the intellectual servants. He was
willing to pay them handsomely, to keep them busy, to treat them
with almost princely courtesy, but he must have the utmost loyalty.
Stimson, while maintaining his calm and reserve, could have kissed
the arch-episcopal hand. Such is the subtlety of contact.
Behold then at once on the North Side, the South Side, the West
Side--dark goings to and fro and walkings up and down in the earth.
In Lake View old General Van Sickle and De Soto Sippens, conferring
with shrewd Councilman Duniway, druggist, and with Jacob Gerecht,
ward boss and wholesale butcher, both of whom were agreeable but
exacting, holding pleasant back-room and drug-store confabs with
almost tabulated details of rewards and benefits. In Hyde Park,
Mr. Kent Barrows McKibben, smug and well dressed, a Chesterfield
among lawyers, and with him one J. J. Bergdoll, a noble hireling,
long-haired and dusty, ostensibly president of the Hyde Park Gas
and Fuel Company, conferring with Councilman Alfred B. Davis,
manufacturer of willow and rattan ware, and Mr. Patrick Gilgan,
saloon-keeper, arranging a prospective distribution of shares,
offering certain cash consideration, lots, favors, and the like.
Observe also in the village of Douglas and West Park on the West
Side, just over the city line, the angular, humorous Peter Laughlin
and Burton Stimson arranging a similar deal or deals.
The enemy, the city gas companies, being divided into three factions,
were in no way prepared for what was now coming. When the news
finally leaked out that applications for franchises had been made
to the several corporate village bodies each old company suspected
the other of invasion, treachery, robbery. Pettifogging lawyers
were sent, one by each company, to the village council in each
particular territory involved, but no one of the companies had as
yet the slightest idea who was back of it all or of the general
plan of operations. Before any one of them could reasonably
protest, before it could decide that it was willing to pay a very
great deal to have the suburb adjacent to its particular territory
left free, before it could organize a legal fight, councilmanic
ordinances were introduced giving the applying company what it
sought; and after a single reading in each case and one open
hearing, as the law compelled, they were almost unanimously passed.
There were loud cries of dismay from minor suburban papers which
had almost been forgotten in the arrangement of rewards. The large
city newspapers cared little at first, seeing these were outlying
districts; they merely made the comment that the villages were
beginning well, following in the steps of the city council in its
distinguished career of crime.
Cowperwood smiled as he saw in the morning papers the announcement
of the passage of each ordinance granting him a franchise. He
listened with comfort thereafter on many a day to accounts by
Laughlin, Sippens, McKibben, and Van Sickle of overtures made to
buy them out, or to take over their franchises. He worked on plans
with Sippens looking to the actual introduction of gas-plants.
There were bond issues now to float, stock to be marketed, contracts
for supplies to be awarded, actual reservoirs and tanks to be built,
and pipes to be laid. A pumped-up public opposition had to be
smoothed over. In all this De Soto Sippens proved a trump. With
Van Sickle, McKibben, and Stimson as his advisers in different
sections of the city he would present tabloid propositions to
Cowperwood, to which the latter had merely to bow his head in assent
or say no. Then De Soto would buy, build, and excavate. Cowperwood
was so pleased that he was determined to keep De Soto with him
permanently. De Soto was pleased to think that he was being given
a chance to pay up old scores and to do large things; he was really
grateful.
"We're not through with those sharpers," he declared to Cowperwood,
triumphantly, one day. "They'll fight us with suits. They may
join hands later. They blew up my gas-plant. They may blow up
ours."
"Let them blow," said Cowperwood. "We can blow, too, and sue also.
I like lawsuits. We'll tie them up so that they'll beg for
quarter." His eyes twinkled cheerfully. _
Read next: chapter IX - In Search of Victory
Read previous: chapter VII - Chicago Gas
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