Good evening, gentlemen.”
He drew out his watch, glanced at it, and quickly walked to the door, putting on his hat as he went.
As he bustled jauntily down the wide interior staircase, preceded by a footman to open the door, a murmur of dissatisfaction arose in the room he had just left.
“The wrecker!” re-exclaimed Norrie Simms, angrily, astounded at this demonstration of defiance.
“The scoundrel!” declared Mr. Blackman.
“Where does he get the wealth to talk like that?”
“Gentlemen,” said Mr. Arneel, stung to the quick by this amazing effrontery, and yet made cautious by the blazing wrath of Cowperwood, “it is useless to debate this question in anger.
Mr. Cowperwood evidently refers to loans which can be controlled in his favor, and of which I for one know nothing.
I do not see what can be done until we do know.
Perhaps some of you can tell us what they are.”
But no one could, and after due calculation advice was borrowed of caution.
The loans of Frank Algernon Cowperwood were not called.
Chapter L. A New York Mansion
The failure of American Match the next morning was one of those events that stirred the city and the nation and lingered in the minds of men for years.
At the last moment it was decided that in lieu of calling Cowperwood’s loans Hull & Stackpole had best be sacrificed, the stock-exchange closed, and all trading ended.
This protected stocks from at least a quotable decline and left the banks free for several days (ten all told) in which to repair their disrupted finances and buttress themselves against the eventual facts.
Naturally, the minor speculators throughout the city—those who had expected to make a fortune out of this crash—raged and complained, but, being faced by an adamantine exchange directorate, a subservient press, and the alliance between the big bankers and the heavy quadrumvirate, there was nothing to be done.
The respective bank presidents talked solemnly of “a mere temporary flurry,” Hand, Schryhart, Merrill, and Arneel went still further into their pockets to protect their interests, and Cowperwood, triumphant, was roundly denounced by the smaller fry as a “bucaneer,” a “pirate,” a “wolf”—indeed, any opprobrious term that came into their minds.
The larger men faced squarely the fact that here was an enemy worthy of their steel.
Would he master them?
Was he already the dominant money power in Chicago?
Could he thus flaunt their helplessness and his superiority in their eyes and before their underlings and go unwhipped?
“I must give in!” Hosmer Hand had declared to Arneel and Schryhart, at the close of the Arneel house conference and as they stood in consultation after the others had departed.
“We seem to be beaten to-night, but I, for one, am not through yet.
He has won to-night, but he won’t win always.
This is a fight to a finish between me and him.
The rest of you can stay in or drop out, just as you wish.”
“Hear, hear!” exclaimed Schryhart, laying a fervently sympathetic hand on his shoulder.
“Every dollar that I have is at your service, Hosmer.
This fellow can’t win eventually.
I’m with you to the end.”
Arneel, walking with Merrill and the others to the door, was silent and dour.
He had been cavalierly affronted by a man who, but a few short years before, he would have considered a mere underling.
Here was Cowperwood bearding the lion in his den, dictating terms to the principal financial figures of the city, standing up trig and resolute, smiling in their faces and telling them in so many words to go to the devil.
Mr. Arneel glowered under lowering brows, but what could he do?
“We must see,” he said to the others, “what time will bring.
Just now there is nothing much to do.
This crisis has been too sudden.
You say you are not through with him, Hosmer, and neither am I.
But we must wait.
We shall have to break him politically in this city, and I am confident that in the end we can do it.”
The others were grateful for his courage even though to-morrow he and they must part with millions to protect themselves and the banks.
For the first time Merrill concluded that he would have to fight Cowperwood openly from now on, though even yet he admired his courage.
“But he is too defiant, too cavalier! A very lion of a man,” he said to himself. “A man with the heart of a Numidian lion.”
It was true.
From this day on for a little while, and because there was no immediate political contest in sight, there was comparative peace in Chicago, although it more resembled an armed camp operating under the terms of some agreed neutrality than it did anything else.
Schryhart, Hand, Arneel, and Merrill were quietly watchful.
Cowperwood’s chief concern was lest his enemies might succeed in their project of worsting him politically in one or all three of the succeeding elections which were due to occur every two years between now and 1903, at which time his franchises would have to be renewed.
As in the past they had made it necessary for him to work against them through bribery and perjury, so in ensuing struggles they might render it more and more difficult for him or his agents to suborn the men elected to office.
The subservient and venal councilmen whom he now controlled might be replaced by men who, if no more honest, would be more loyal to the enemy, thus blocking the extension of his franchises.