of
his name in this connection the whole courtroom bristled.

Cowperwood came forward briskly and quickly. He was so calm, so jaunty,
so defiant of life, and yet so courteous to it. These lawyers, this
jury, this straw-and-water judge, these machinations of fate, did not
basically disturb or humble or weaken him. He saw through the mental
equipment of the jury at once. He wanted to assist his counsel in
disturbing and confusing Shannon, but his reason told him that only an
indestructible fabric of fact or seeming would do it. He believed in the
financial rightness of the thing he had done. He was entitled to do it.
Life was war--particularly financial life; and strategy was its keynote,
its duty, its necessity. Why should he bother about petty, picayune
minds which could not understand this? He went over his history for
Steger and the jury, and put the sanest, most comfortable light on it
that he could. He had not gone to Mr. Stener in the first place, he
said--he had been called. He had not urged Mr. Stener to anything. He
had merely shown him and his friends financial possibilities which they
were only too eager to seize upon. And they had seized upon them. (It
was not possible for Shannon to discover at this period how subtly he
had organized his street-car companies so that he could have "shaken
out" Stener and his friends without their being able to voice a single
protest, so he talked of these things as opportunities which he had made
for Stener and others. Shannon was not a financier, neither was
Steger. They had to believe in a way, though they doubted it,
partly--particularly Shannon.) He was not responsible for the custom
prevailing in the office of the city treasurer, he said. He was a banker
and broker.

The jury looked at him, and believed all except this matter of the
sixty-thousand-dollar check. When it came to that he explained it all
plausibly enough. When he had gone to see Stener those several last
days, he had not fancied that he was really going to fail. He had
asked Stener for some money, it is true--not so very much, all things
considered--one hundred and fifty thousand dollars; but, as Stener
should have testified, he (Cowperwood) was not disturbed in his manner.
Stener had merely been one resource of his. He was satisfied at that
time that he had many others. He had not used the forceful language or
made the urgent appeal which Stener said he had, although he had pointed
out to Stener that it