not have, he could not have. He turned his attention with
renewed force to his business; but it was with many a backward glance
at those radiant hours when, with Rita in his presence or enfolded by
his arms, he had seen life from a new and poetic angle. She was so
charming, so naive--but what could he do?

For several years thereafter Cowperwood was busy following the Chicago
street-railway situation with increasing interest. He knew it was
useless to brood over Rita Sohlberg--she would not return--and yet he
could not help it; but he could work hard, and that was something. His
natural aptitude and affection for street-railway work had long since
been demonstrated, and it was now making him restless. One might have
said of him quite truly that the tinkle of car-bells and the plop of
plodding horses' feet was in his blood. He surveyed these extending
lines, with their jingling cars, as he went about the city, with an
almost hungry eye. Chicago was growing fast, and these little
horse-cars on certain streets were crowded night and morning--fairly
bulging with people at the rush-hours. If he could only secure an
octopus-grip on one or all of them; if he could combine and control
them all! What a fortune! That, if nothing else, might salve him for
some of his woes--a tremendous fortune--nothing less. He forever
busied himself with various aspects of the scene quite as a poet might
have concerned himself with rocks and rills. To own these
street-railways! To own these street-railways! So rang the song of his
mind.

Like the gas situation, the Chicago street-railway situation was
divided into three parts--three companies representing and
corresponding with the three different sides or divisions of the city.
The Chicago City Railway Company, occupying the South Side and
extending as far south as Thirty-ninth Street, had been organized in
1859, and represented in itself a mine of wealth. Already it
controlled some seventy miles of track, and was annually being added to
on Indiana Avenue, on Wabash Avenue, on State Street, and on Archer
Avenue. It owned over one hundred and fifty cars of the old-fashioned,
straw-strewn, no-stove type, and over one thousand horses; it employed
one hundred and seventy conductors, one hundred and sixty drivers, a
hundred stablemen, and blacksmiths, harness-makers, and repairers in
interesting numbers. Its snow-plows were busy on the street in winter,
its sprinkling-cars in summer.