issuable
or returnable on a legal holiday, when no courts were sitting.
Nevertheless, by three o'clock in the afternoon an obliging magistrate
was found who consented to issue an injunction staying this terrible
crime. By this time, however, the building was gone, the excavation
complete. It remained merely for the West Chicago Street Railway
Company to secure an injunction vacating the first injunction, praying
that its rights, privileges, liberties, etc., be not interfered with,
and so creating a contest which naturally threw the matter into the
State Court of Appeals, where it could safely lie. For several years
there were numberless injunctions, writs of errors, doubts, motions to
reconsider, threats to carry the matter from the state to the federal
courts on a matter of constitutional privilege, and the like. The
affair was finally settled out of court, for Mr. Purdy by this time was
a more sensible man. In the mean time, however, the newspapers had
been given full details of the transaction, and a storm of words
against Cowperwood ensued.

But more disturbing than the Redmond Purdy incident was the rivalry of
a new Chicago street-railway company. It appeared first as an idea in
the brain of one James Furnivale Woolsen, a determined young Westerner
from California, and developed by degrees into consents and petitions
from fully two-thirds of the residents of various streets in the
extreme southwest section of the city where it was proposed the new
line should be located. This same James Furnivale Woolsen, being an
ambitious person, was not to be so easily put down. Besides the
consent and petitions, which Cowperwood could not easily get away from
him, he had a new form of traction then being tried out in several
minor cities--a form of electric propulsion by means of an overhead
wire and a traveling pole, which was said to be very economical, and to
give a service better than cables and cheaper even than horses.

Cowperwood had heard all about this new electric system some time
before, and had been studying it for several years with the greatest
interest, since it promised to revolutionize the whole business of
street-railroading. However, having but so recently completed his
excellent cable system, he did not see that it was advisable to throw
it away. The trolley was as yet too much of a novelty; certainly it
was not advisable to have it introduced into Chicago until he was ready
to introduce it himse