"And what can I be doing for you to-day, Mr. Cowperwood?" he inquired, when he arrived looking nice and fresh, very spick and span after his victory.
"Listen, Mr. Gilgan," said Cowperwood, simply, eying the Republican county chairman very fixedly and twiddling his thumbs with fingers interlocked, "are you going to let the city council jam through the General Electric and that South Side 'L' road ordinance without giving me a chance to say a word or do anything about it?"
Mr. Gilgan, so Cowperwood knew, was only one of a new quadrumvirate setting out to rule the city, but he pretended to believe that he was the last word--an all power and authority--after the fashion of McKenty. "Me good man," replied Gilgan, archly, "you flatter me. I haven't the city council in me vest pocket. I've been county chairman, it's true, and helped to elect some of these men, but I don't own 'em. Why shouldn't they pass the General Electric ordinance? It's an honest ordinance, as far as I know. All the newspapers have been for it. As for this 'L' road ordinance, I haven't anything to do with it. It isn't anything I know much about. Young MacDonald and Mr. Schryhart are looking after that."
As a matter of fact, all that Mr. Gilgan was saying was decidedly true. A henchman of young MacDonald's who was beginning to learn to play politics--an alderman bythe name of Klemm--had been scheduled as a kind of field-marshal, and it was MacDonald--not Gilgan, Tiernan, Kerrigan, or Edstrom--who was to round up the recalcitrant aldermen, telling them their duty. Gilgan's quadrumvirate had not as yet got their machine in good working order, though they were doing their best to bring this about. "I helped to elect every one of these men, it's true; but that doesn't mean I'm running 'em by any means," concluded Gilgan. "Not yet, anyhow."
At the "not yet" Cowperwood smiled.
"Just the same, Mr. Gilgan," he went on, smoothly, "you're the nominal head and front of this whole movement in opposition to me at present, and you're the one I have to look to. You have this present Republican situation almost entirely in your own fingers, and you can do about as you like if you're so minded. If you choose you can persuade the members of council to take considerable more time than they otherwise would in passing these ordinances --of that I'm sure. I don't know whether you know or not, Mr.
Gilgan, though I suppose you do, that this whole fight against me is a strike campaign intended to drive me out of Chicago. Now you're a man of sense and judgment and considerable business experience, and I want to ask you if you think that is fair. I came here some sixteen or seventeen years ago and went into the gas business. It was an open field, the field I undertook to develop--outlying towns on the North, South, and West sides. Yet the moment I started the old-line companies began to fight me, though I wasn't invading their territory at all at the time."
"I remember it well enough," replied Gilgan. "I was one of the men that helped you to get your Hyde Park franchise. You'd never have got it if it hadn't been for me. That fellow McKibben," added Gilgan, with a grin, "a likely chap, him. He always walked as if he had on rubber shoes. He's with you yet, I suppose?"
"Yes, he's around here somewhere," replied Cowperwood, loftily.
"But to go back to this other matter, most of the men that are behind this General Electric ordinance and this 'L' road franchise were in the gas business--Blackman, Jules, Baker, Schryhart, and others--and they are angry because I came into their field, and angrier still because they had eventually to buy me out. They're angry because I reorganized these old-fashioned street-railway companies here and put them on their feet. Merrill is angry because I didn't run a loop around his store, and the others are angry because I ever got a loop at all. They're all angry because I managed to step in and do the things that they should have done long before. I came here--and that's the whole story in a nutshell.
