s
would have to be taken care of and then resigned--to become, seven
months later, president of the Chicago Trust Company. This desertion
created a great stir at the time, astonishing the very men who had
suspected that it might come to pass. The papers were full of it.

"Well, let him go," observed Arneel to Hand, sourly, on the day that
Addison notified the board of directors of the Lake City of his
contemplated resignation. "If he wants to sever his connection with a
bank like this to go with a man like that, it's his own lookout. He
may live to regret it."

It so happened that by now another election was pending Chicago, and
Hand, along with Schryhart and Arneel--who joined their forces because
of his friendship for Hand--decided to try to fight Cowperwood through
this means.

Hosmer Hand, feeling that he had the burden of a great duty upon him,
was not slow in acting. He was always, when aroused, a determined and
able fighter. Needing an able lieutenant in the impending political
conflict, he finally bethought himself of a man who had recently come
to figure somewhat conspicuously in Chicago politics--one Patrick
Gilgan, the same Patrick Gilgan of Cowperwood's old Hyde Park gas-war
days. Mr. Gilgan was now a comparatively well-to-do man. Owing to a
genial capacity for mixing with people, a close mouth, and absolutely
no understanding of, and consequently no conscience in matters of large
public import (in so far as they related to the so-called rights of the
mass), he was a fit individual to succeed politically. His saloon was
the finest in all Wentworth Avenue. It fairly glittered with the newly
introduced incandescent lamp reflected in a perfect world of beveled
and faceted mirrors. His ward, or district, was full of low,
rain-beaten cottages crowded together along half-made streets; but
Patrick Gilgan was now a state senator, slated for Congress at the next
Congressional election, and a possible successor of the Hon. John J.
McKenty as dictator of the city, if only the Republican party should
come into power. (Hyde Park, before it had been annexed to the city,
had always been Republican, and since then, although the larger city
was normally Democratic, Gilgan could not conveniently change.) Hearing
from the political discussion which preceded the election that Gilgan
was by far the most powerful politician on the South Side, Hand sent
for him. Personally, Hand had far less sympathy with the polit