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_ Subsequently Mr. Kerrigan called on Mr. Tiernan casually. Mr.
Tiernan returned the call. A little later Messrs. Tiernan,
Kerrigan, and Gilgan, in a parlor-room in a small hotel in Milwaukee
(in order not to be seen together), conferred. Finally Messrs.
Tiernan, Edstrom, Kerrigan, and Gilgan met and mapped out a programme
of division far too intricate to be indicated here. Needless to
say, it involved the division of chief clerks, pro rata, of police
graft, of gambling and bawdy-house perquisites, of returns from
gas, street-railway, and other organizations. It was sealed with
many solemn promises. If it could be made effective this quadrumvirate
was to endure for years. Judges, small magistrates, officers large
and small, the shrievalty, the water office, the tax office, all
were to come within its purview. It was a fine, handsome political
dream, and as such worthy of every courtesy and consideration but
it was only a political dream in its ultimate aspects, and as such
impressed the participants themselves at times.
The campaign was now in full blast. The summer and fall (September
and October) went by to the tune of Democratic and Republican
marching club bands, to the sound of lusty political voices orating
in parks, at street-corners, in wooden "wigwams," halls, tents,
and parlors--wherever a meager handful of listeners could be
drummed up and made by any device to keep still. The newspapers
honked and bellowed, as is the way with those profit-appointed
advocates and guardians of "right" and "justice. Cowperwood and
McKenty were denounced from nearly every street-corner in Chicago.
Wagons and sign-boards on wheels were hauled about labeled "Break
the partnership between the street-railway corporations and the
city council." "Do you want more streets stolen?" "Do you want
Cowperwood to own Chicago?" Cowperwood himself, coming down-town
of a morning or driving home of an evening, saw these things. He
saw the huge signs, listened to speeches denouncing himself, and
smiled. By now he was quite aware as to whence this powerful
uprising had sprung. Hand was back of it, he knew--for so McKenty
and Addison had quickly discovered--and with Hand was Schryhart,
Arneel, Merrill, the Douglas Trust Company, the various editors,
young Truman Leslie MacDonald, the old gas crowd, the Chicago
General Company--all. He even suspected that certain aldermen
might possibly be suborned to desert him, though all professed
loyalty. McKenty, Addison, Videra, and himself were planning the
details of their defenses as carefully and effectively as possible.
Cowperwood was fully alive to the fact that if he lost this
election--the first to be vigorously contested--it might involve
a serious chain of events; but he did not propose to be unduly
disturbed, since he could always fight in the courts by money, and
by preferment in the council, and with the mayor and the city
attorney. "There is more than one way to kill a cat," was one of
his pet expressions, and it expressed his logic and courage exactly.
Yet he did not wish to lose.
One of the amusing features of the campaign was that the McKenty
orators had been instructed to shout as loudly for reforms as the
Republicans, only instead of assailing Cowperwood and McKenty they
were to point out that Schryhart's Chicago City Railway was far
more rapacious, and that this was a scheme to give it a blanket
franchise of all streets not yet covered by either the Cowperwood
or the Schryhart-Hand-Arneel lines. It was a pretty argument.
The Democrats could point with pride to a uniformly liberal
interpretation of some trying Sunday laws, whereby under Republican
and reform administrations it had been occasionally difficult for
the honest working-man to get his glass or pail of beer on Sunday.
On the other hand it was possible for the Republican orators to
show how "the low dives and gin-mills" were everywhere being
operated in favor of McKenty, and that under the highly respectable
administration of the Republican candidate for mayor this partnership
between the city government and vice and crime would be nullified.
"If I am elected," declared the Honorable Chaffee Thayer Sluss,
the Republican candidate, "neither Frank Cowperwood nor John McKenty
will dare to show his face in the City Hall unless he comes with
clean hands and an honest purpose.
"Hooray!" yelled the crowd.
"I know that ass," commented Addison, when he read this in the
Transcript. "He used to be a clerk in the Douglas Trust Company.
He's made a little money recently in the paper business. He's a
mere tool for the Arneel-Schryhart interests. He hasn't the courage
of a two-inch fish-worm."
When McKenty read it he simply observed: "There are other ways of
going to City Hall than by going yourself." He was depending upon
a councilmanic majority at least.
However, in the midst of this uproar the goings to and fro of
Gilgan, Edstrom, Kerrigan, and Tiernan were nor fully grasped. A
more urbanely shifty pair than these latter were never seen. While
fraternizing secretly with both Gilgan and Edstrom, laying out
their political programme most neatly, they were at the same time
conferring with Dowling, Duvanicki, even McKenty himself. Seeing
that the outcome was, for some reason--he could scarcely see why
--looking very uncertain, McKenty one day asked the two of them
to come to see him. On getting the letter Mr. Tiernan strolled
over to Mr. Kerrigan's place to see whether he also had received
a message.
"Sure, sure! I did!" replied Mr. Kerrigan, gaily. "Here it is now
in me outside coat pocket. 'Dear Mr. Kerrigan,"' he read, "'won't
you do me the favor to come over to-morrow evening at seven and
dine with me? Mr. Ungerich, Mr. Duvanicki, and several others will
very likely drop in afterward. I have asked Mr. Tiernan to come
at the same time. Sincerely, John J. McKenty.' That's the way
he does it," added Mr. Kerrigan; "just like that.
He kissed the letter mockingly and put it back into his pocket.
"Sure I got one, jist the same way. The very same langwidge,
nearly," commented Mr. Tiernan, sweetly. "He's beginning to wake
up, eh? What! The little old first and second are beginning to
look purty big just now, eh? What!"
"Tush!" observed Mr. Kerrigan to Mr. Tiernan, with a marked sardonic
emphasis, "that combination won't last forever. They've been
getting too big for their pants, I'm thinking. Well, it's a long
road, eh? It's pretty near time, what?"
"You're right," responded Mr. Tiernan, feelingly. "It is a long
road. These are the two big wards of the city, and everybody knows
it. If we turn on them at the last moment where will they be, eh?"
He put a fat finger alongside of his heavy reddish nose and looked
at Mr. Kerrigan out of squinted eyes.
"You're damned right," replied the little politician, cheerfully.
They went to the dinner separately, so as not to appear to have
conferred before, and greeted each other on arriving as though
they had not seen each other for days.
"How's business, Mike?"
"Oh, fair, Pat. How's things with you?"
"So so."
"Things lookin' all right in your ward for November?"
Mr. Tiernan wrinkled a fat forehead. "Can't tell yet." All this
was for the benefit of Mr. McKenty, who did not suspect rank party
disloyalty.
Nothing much came of this conference, except that they sat about
discussing in a general way wards, pluralities, what Zeigler was
likely to do with the twelfth, whether Pinski could make it in the
sixth, Schlumbohm in the twentieth, and so on. New Republican
contestants in old, safe Democratic wards were making things look
dubious.
"And how about the first, Kerrigan?" inquired Ungerich, a thin,
reflective German-American of shrewd presence. Ungerich was one
who had hitherto wormed himself higher in McKenty's favor than
either Kerrigan or Tiernan.
"Oh, the first's all right," replied Kerrigan, archly. "Of course
you never can tell. This fellow Scully may do something, but I
don't think it will be much. If we have the same police protection--"
Ungerich was gratified. He was having a struggle in his own ward,
where a rival by the name of Glover appeared to be pouring out
money like water. He would require considerably more money than
usual to win. It was the same with Duvanicki.
McKenty finally parted with his lieutenants--more feelingly with
Kerrigan and Tiernan than he had ever done before. He did not
wholly trust these two, and he could not exactly admire them and
their methods, which were the roughest of all, but they were useful.
"I'm glad to learn," he said, at parting, "that things are looking
all right with you, Pat, and you, Mike," nodding to each in turn.
"We're going to need the most we can get out of everybody. I
depend on you two to make a fine showing--the best of any. The
rest of us will not forget it when the plums are being handed
around afterward."
"Oh, you can depend on me to do the best I can always," commented
Mr. Kerrigan, sympathetically. "It's a tough year, but we haven't
failed yet."
"And me, Chief! That goes for me," observed Mr. Tiernan, raucously.
"I guess I can do as well as I have."
"Good for you, Mike!" soothed McKenty, laying a gentle hand on his
shoulder. "And you, too, Kerrigan. Yours are the key wards, and
we understand that. I've always been sorry that the leaders
couldn't agree on you two for something better than councilmen;
but next time there won't be any doubt of it, if I have any influence
then." He went in and closed the door. Outside a cool October
wind was whipping dead leaves and weed stalks along the pavements.
Neither Tiernan nor Kerrigan spoke, though they had come away
together, until they were two hundred feet down the avenue toward
Van Buren.
"Some talk, that, eh?" commented Mr. Tiernan, eying Mr. Kerrigan
in the flare of a passing gas-lamp.
"Sure. That's the stuff they always hand out when they're up
against it. Pretty kind words, eh?"
"And after ten years of about the roughest work that's done, eh?
It's about time, what? Say, it's a wonder he didn't think of that
last June when the convention was in session.
"Tush! Mikey," smiled Mr. Kerrigan, grimly. "You're a bad little
boy. You want your pie too soon. Wait another two or four or six
years, like Paddy Kerrigan and the others."
"Yes, I will--not," growled Mr. Tiernan. "Wait'll the sixth."
"No more, will I," replied Mr. Kerrigan. "Say, we know a trick
that beats that next-year business to a pulp. What?"
"You're dead right," commented Mr. Tiernan.
And so they went peacefully home. _
Read next: chapter XXXVII - Aileen's Revenge
Read previous: chapter XXXV - A Political Agreement
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