Call it three hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars cash, and my check to-night.”
“I wouldn’t take five or six hundred thousand dollars if you were to offer it to me, Mr. Cowperwood, to-night or any other time.
I know my rights.”
“Very well, then,” replied Cowperwood, “that’s all I can say.
If you won’t sell, you won’t sell.
Perhaps you’ll change your mind later.”
Mr. Purdy went out, and Cowperwood called in his lawyers and his engineers.
One Saturday afternoon, a week or two later, when the building in question had been vacated for the day, a company of three hundred laborers, with wagons, picks, shovels, and dynamite sticks, arrived.
By sundown of the next day (which, being Sunday, was a legal holiday, with no courts open or sitting to issue injunctions) this comely structure, the private property of Mr. Redmond Purdy, was completely razed and a large excavation substituted in its stead.
The gentleman of the celluloid cuffs and collars, when informed about nine o’clock of this same Sunday morning that his building had been almost completely removed, was naturally greatly perturbed.
A portion of the wall was still standing when he arrived, hot and excited, and the police were appealed to.
But, strange to say, this was of little avail, for they were shown a writ of injunction issued by the court of highest jurisdiction, presided over by the Hon. Nahum Dickensheets, which restrained all and sundry from interfering. (Subsequently on demand of another court this remarkable document was discovered to have disappeared; the contention was that it had never really existed or been produced at all.) The demolition and digging proceeded.
Then began a scurrying of lawyers to the door of one friendly judge after another.
There were apoplectic cheeks, blazing eyes, and gasps for breath while the enormity of the offense was being noised abroad. Law is law, however. Procedure is procedure, and no writ of injunction was either issuable or returnable on a legal holiday, when no courts were sitting.
Nevertheless, by three o’clock in the afternoon an obliging magistrate was found who consented to issue an injunction staying this terrible crime.
By this time, however, the building was gone, the excavation complete.
It remained merely for the West Chicago Street Railway Company to secure an injunction vacating the first injunction, praying that its rights, privileges, liberties, etc., be not interfered with, and so creating a contest which naturally threw the matter into the State Court of Appeals, where it could safely lie.
For several years there were numberless injunctions, writs of errors, doubts, motions to reconsider, threats to carry the matter from the state to the federal courts on a matter of constitutional privilege, and the like.
The affair was finally settled out of court, for Mr. Purdy by this time was a more sensible man.
In the mean time, however, the newspapers had been given full details of the transaction, and a storm of words against Cowperwood ensued.
But more disturbing than the Redmond Purdy incident was the rivalry of a new Chicago street-railway company.
It appeared first as an idea in the brain of one James Furnivale Woolsen, a determined young Westerner from California, and developed by degrees into consents and petitions from fully two-thirds of the residents of various streets in the extreme southwest section of the city where it was proposed the new line should be located.
This same James Furnivale Woolsen, being an ambitious person, was not to be so easily put down.
Besides the consent and petitions, which Cowperwood could not easily get away from him, he had a new form of traction then being tried out in several minor cities—a form of electric propulsion by means of an overhead wire and a traveling pole, which was said to be very economical, and to give a service better than cables and cheaper even than horses.
Cowperwood had heard all about this new electric system some time before, and had been studying it for several years with the greatest interest, since it promised to revolutionize the whole business of street-railroading.
However, having but so recently completed his excellent cable system, he did not see that it was advisable to throw it away.
The trolley was as yet too much of a novelty; certainly it was not advisable to have it introduced into Chicago until he was ready to introduce it himself—first on his outlying feeder lines, he thought, then perhaps generally.
But before he could take suitable action against Woolsen, that engaging young upstart, who was possessed of a high-power imagination and a gift of gab, had allied himself with such interested investors as Truman Leslie MacDonald, who saw here a heaven-sent opportunity of mulcting Cowperwood, and Jordan Jules, once the president of the North Chicago Gas Company, who had lost money through Cowperwood in the gas war.
Two better instruments for goading a man whom they considered an enemy could not well be imagined—Truman Leslie with his dark, waspish, mistrustful, jealous eyes, and his slim, vital body; and Jordan Jules, short, rotund, sandy, a sickly crop of thin, oily, light hair growing down over his coat-collar, his forehead and crown glisteningly bald, his eyes a seeking, searching, revengeful blue.
They in turn brought in Samuel Blackman, once president of the South Side Gas Company; Sunderland Sledd, of local railroad management and stock-investment fame; and Norrie Simms, president of the Douglas Trust Company, who, however, was little more than a fiscal agent.
The general feeling was that Cowperwood’s defensive tactics—which consisted in having the city council refuse to act—could be easily met.
“Well, I think we can soon fix that,” exclaimed young MacDonald, one morning at a meeting. “We ought to be able to smoke them out.
A little publicity will do it.”
He appealed to his father, the editor of the Inquirer, but the latter refused to act for the time being, seeing that his son was interested. MacDonald, enraged at the do-nothing attitude of the council, invaded that body and demanded of Alderman Dowling, still leader, why this matter of the Chicago general ordinances was still lying unconsidered.
Mr. Dowling, a large, mushy, placid man with blue eyes, an iron frame, and a beefy smile, vouchsafed the information that, although he was chairman of the committee on streets and alleys, he knew nothing about it.
“I haven’t been payin’ much attention to things lately,” he replied.
Mr. MacDonald went to see the remaining members of this same committee.
They were non-committal.
They would have to look into the matter.
Somebody claimed that there was a flaw in the petitions.
Evidently there was crooked work here somewhere.
Cowperwood was to blame, no doubt. MacDonald conferred with Blackman and Jordan Jules, and it was determined that the council should be harried into doing its duty.
This was a legitimate enterprise.
A new and better system of traction was being kept out of the city.
Schryhart, since he was offered an interest, and since there was considerable chance of his being able to dominate the new enterprise, agreed that the ordinances ought to be acted upon.
In consequence there was a renewed hubbub in the newspapers.
It was pointed out through Schryhart’s Chronicle, through Hyssop’s and Merrill’s papers, and through the Inquirer that such a situation was intolerable.
If the dominant party, at the behest of so sinister an influence as Cowperwood, was to tie up all outside traction legislation, there could be but one thing left—an appeal to the voters of the city to turn the rascals out.
No party could survive such a record of political trickery and financial jugglery. McKenty, Dowling, Cowperwood, and others were characterized as unreasonable obstructionists and debasing influences.
But Cowperwood merely smiled.