Sides, where concrete conduits were being laid, new grip and
trailer cars built, new car-barns erected, and large, shining
power-houses put up. The city, so long used to the old bridge delays,
the straw-strewn, stoveless horse-cars on their jumping rails, was agog
to see how fine this new service would be. The La Salle Street tunnel
was soon aglow with white plaster and electric lights. The long
streets and avenues of the North Side were threaded with concrete-lined
conduits and heavy street-rails. The powerhouses were completed and
the system was started, even while the contracts for the changes on the
West Side were being let.

Schryhart and his associates were amazed at this swiftness of action,
this dizzy phantasmagoria of financial operations. It looked very much
to the conservative traction interests of Chicago as if this young
giant out of the East had it in mind to eat up the whole city. The
Chicago Trust Company, which he, Addison, McKenty, and others had
organized to manipulate the principal phases of the local bond issues,
and of which he was rumored to be in control, was in a flourishing
condition. Apparently he could now write his check for millions, and
yet he was not beholden, so far as the older and more conservative
multimillionaires of Chicago were concerned, to any one of them. The
worst of it was that this Cowperwood--an upstart, a jail-bird, a
stranger whom they had done their best to suppress financially and
ostracize socially, had now become an attractive, even a sparkling
figure in the eyes of the Chicago public. His views and opinions on
almost any topic were freely quoted; the newspapers, even the most
antagonistic, did not dare to neglect him. Their owners were now fully
alive to the fact that a new financial rival had appeared who was
worthy of their steel.

Chapter XXVII

A Financier Bewitched

It was interesting to note how, able though he was, and bound up with
this vast street-railway enterprise which was beginning to affect
several thousand men, his mind could find intense relief and
satisfaction in the presence and actions of Stephanie Platow. It is not
too much to say that in her, perhaps, he found revivified the spirit
and personality of Rita Sohlberg. Rita, however, had not contemplated
disloyalty--it had never occurred to her to be faithless to Cowperwood
so long as he was fond of her any more than for a long time it had been
possible for her, even after all