Within eight months after seizing the La Salle Street tunnel and gobbling four of the principal down-town streets for his loop, Cowperwood turned his eyes toward the completion of the second part of the programme--that of taking over the Washington Street tunnel and the Chicago West Division Company, which was still drifting along under its old horse-car regime. It was the story of the North Side company all over again. Stockholders of a certain type--the average--are extremely nervous, sensitive, fearsome.
They are like that peculiar bivalve, the clam, which at the slightest sense of untoward pressure withdraws into its shell and ceases all activity. The city tax department began by instituting proceedings against the West Division company, compelling them to disgorge various unpaid street-car taxes which had hitherto been conveniently neglected. The city highway department was constantly jumping on them for neglect of street repairs. The city water department, by some hocus-pocus, made it its business to discover that they had been stealing water. On the other hand were the smiling representatives of Cowperwood, Kaifrath, Addison, Videra, and others, approaching one director or stockholder after another with glistening accounts of what a splendid day would set in for the Chicago West Division Company if only it would lease fifty-one per cent. of its holdings--fifty-one per cent. of twelve hundred and fifty shares, par value two hundred dollars--for the fascinating sum of six hundred dollars per share, and thirty per cent. interest on all stock not assumed.
Who could resist? Starve and beat a dog on the one hand; wheedle, pet, and hold meat in front of it on the other, and it can soon be brought to perform. Cowperwood knew this. His emissaries for good and evil were tireless. In the end--and it was not long in coming--the directors and chief stockholders of the Chicago West Division Company succumbed; and then, ho! the sudden leasing by the Chicago West Division Company of all its property--to the North Chicago Street Railway Company, lessee in turn of the Chicago City Passenger Railway, a line which Cowperwood had organized to take over the Washington Street tunnel. How had he accomplished it?
The question was on the tip of every financial tongue. Who were the men or the organization providing the enormous sums necessary to pay six hundred dollars per share for six hundred and fifty shares of the twelve hundred and fifty belonging to the old West Division company, and thirty per cent. per year on all the remainder?
Where was the money coming from to cable all these lines? It was simple enough if they had only thought. Cowperwood was merely capitalizing the future.
Before the newspapers or the public could suitably protest, crowds of men were at work day and night in the business heart of the city, their flaring torches and resounding hammers making a fitful bedlamic world of that region; they were laying the first great cable loop and repairing the La Salle Street tunnel. It was the same on the North and West Sides, where concrete conduits were being laid, new grip and trailer cars built, new car-barns erected, and large, shining power-houses put up. The city, so long used to the old bridge delays, the straw-strewn, stoveless horse-cars on their jumping rails, was agog to see how fine this new service would be. The La Salle Street tunnel was soon aglow with white plaster and electric lights. The long streets and avenues of the North Side were threaded with concrete-lined conduits and heavy street-rails. The powerhouses were completed and the system was started, even while the contracts for the changes on the West Side were being let.
Schryhart and his associates were amazed at this swiftness of action, this dizzy phantasmagoria of financial operations. It looked very much to the conservative traction interests of Chicago as if this young giant out of the East had it in mind to eat up the whole city. The Chicago Trust Company, which he, Addison, McKenty, and others had organized to manipulate the principal phases of the local bond issues, and of which he was rumored to be in control, was in a flourishing condition. Apparently he could now write his check for millions, and yet he was not beholden, so far as the older and more conservative multimillionaires of Chicago were concerned, to any one of them. The worst of it was that this Cowperwood--an upstart, a jail-bird, a stranger whom they had done their best to suppress financially and ostracize socially, had now become an attractive, even a sparkling figure in the eyes of the Chicago public. His views and opinions on almost any topic were freely quoted; the newspapers, even the most antagonistic, did not dare to neglect him. Their owners were now fully alive to the fact that a new financial rival had appeared who was worthy of their steel.
