"Whew!" exclaimed Owen in astonishment.
"Five hundred thousand dollars!
Good Lord, father!
Do you mean to say Stener has got away with five hundred thousand dollars?
Why, I wouldn't think he was clever enough to do that.
Five hundred thousand dollars!
It will make a nice row if that comes out."
"Aisy, now! Aisy, now!" replied Butler, doing his best to keep all phases of the situation in mind.
"We can't tell exactly what the circumstances were yet.
He mayn't have meant to take so much.
It may all come out all right yet.
The money's invested.
Cowperwood hasn't failed yet.
It may be put back.
The thing to be settled on now is whether anything can be done to save him.
If he's tellin' me the truth—and I never knew him to lie—he can get out of this if street-railway stocks don't break too heavy in the mornin'.
I'm going over to see Henry Mollenhauer and Mark Simpson.
They're in on this.
Cowperwood wanted me to see if I couldn't get them to get the bankers together and have them stand by the market.
He thought we might protect our loans by comin' on and buyin' and holdin' up the price."
Owen was running swiftly in his mind over Cowperwood's affairs—as much as he knew of them.
He felt keenly that the banker ought to be shaken out.
This dilemma was his fault, not Stener's—he felt.
It was strange to him that his father did not see it and resent it.
"You see what it is, father," he said, dramatically, after a time.
"Cowperwood's been using this money of Stener's to pick up stocks, and he's in a hole.
If it hadn't been for this fire he'd have got away with it; but now he wants you and Simpson and Mollenhauer and the others to pull him out.
He's a nice fellow, and I like him fairly well; but you're a fool if you do as he wants you to.
He has more than belongs to him already.
I heard the other day that he has the Front Street line, and almost all of Green and Coates; and that he and Stener own the Seventeenth and Nineteenth; but I didn't believe it. I've been intending to ask you about it.
I think Cowperwood has a majority for himself stowed away somewhere in every instance.
Stener is just a pawn. He moves him around where he pleases."
Owen's eyes gleamed avariciously, opposingly.
Cowperwood ought to be punished, sold out, driven out of the street-railway business in which Owen was anxious to rise.
"Now you know," observed Butler, thickly and solemnly, "I always thought that young felly was clever, but I hardly thought he was as clever as all that.
So that's his game.
You're pretty shrewd yourself, aren't you?
Well, we can fix that, if we think well of it.
But there's more than that to all this.
You don't want to forget the Republican party.
Our success goes with the success of that, you know"—and he paused and looked at his son.
"If Cowperwood should fail and that money couldn't be put back—" He broke off abstractedly.
"The thing that's troublin' me is this matter of Stener and the city treasury.
If somethin' ain't done about that, it may go hard with the party this fall, and with some of our contracts.
You don't want to forget that an election is comin' along in November.
I'm wonderin' if I ought to call in that one hundred thousand dollars.
It's goin' to take considerable money to meet my loans in the mornin'."
It is a curious matter of psychology, but it was only now that the real difficulties of the situation were beginning to dawn on Butler.
In the presence of Cowperwood he was so influenced by that young man's personality and his magnetic presentation of his need and his own liking for him that he had not stopped to consider all the phases of his own relationship to the situation.
Out here in the cool night air, talking to Owen, who was ambitious on his own account and anything but sentimentally considerate of Cowperwood, he was beginning to sober down and see things in their true light.