re a bridge loaded with heavy traffic now swung.
There were all sorts of complications. In the first place, the consent
of the War Department at Washington had to be secured in order to
tunnel under the river at all. Secondly, the excavation, if directly
under the bridge, might prove an intolerable nuisance, necessitating
the closing or removal of the bridge. Owing to the critical, not to
say hostile, attitude of the newspapers which, since the La Salle and
Washington tunnel grants, were following his every move with a
searchlight, Cowperwood decided not to petition the city for privileges
in this case, but instead to buy the property rights of sufficient land
just north of the bridge, where the digging of the tunnel could proceed
without interference.

The piece of land most suitable for this purpose, a lot 150 x 150,
lying a little way from the river-bank, and occupied by a seven-story
loft-building, was owned by the previously mentioned Redmond Purdy, a
long, thin, angular, dirty person, who wore celluloid collars and cuffs
and spoke with a nasal intonation.

Cowperwood had the customary overtures made by seemingly disinterested
parties endeavoring to secure the land at a fair price. But Purdy, who
was as stingy as a miser and as incisive as a rat-trap, had caught wind
of the proposed tunnel scheme. He was all alive for a fine profit.
"No, no, no," he declared, over and over, when approached by the
representatives of Mr. Sylvester Toomey, Cowperwood's ubiquitous
land-agent. "I don't want to sell. Go away."

Mr. Sylvester Toomey was finally at his wit's end, and complained to
Cowperwood, who at once sent for those noble beacons of dark and stormy
waters, General Van Sickle and the Hon. Kent Barrows McKibben. The
General was now becoming a little dolty, and Cowperwood was thinking of
pensioning him; but McKibben was in his prime--smug, handsome, deadly,
smooth. After talking it over with Mr. Toomey they returned to
Cowperwood's office with a promising scheme. The Hon. Nahum
Dickensheets, one of the judges of the State Court of Appeals, and a
man long since attached, by methods which need not here be described,
to Cowperwood's star, had been persuaded to bring his extensive
technical knowledge to bear on the emergency. At his suggestion the
work of digging the tunnel was at once begun--first at the east or
Franklin Street end; then, after eight months' digging, at the west or
Canal Street end. A shaft was