"I helped to elect every one of these men, it's
true; but that doesn't mean I'm running 'em by any means," concluded
Gilgan. "Not yet, anyhow."

At the "not yet" Cowperwood smiled.

"Just the same, Mr. Gilgan," he went on, smoothly, "you're the nominal
head and front of this whole movement in opposition to me at present,
and you're the one I have to look to. You have this present Republican
situation almost entirely in your own fingers, and you can do about as
you like if you're so minded. If you choose you can persuade the
members of council to take considerable more time than they otherwise
would in passing these ordinances--of that I'm sure. I don't know
whether you know or not, Mr. Gilgan, though I suppose you do, that this
whole fight against me is a strike campaign intended to drive me out of
Chicago. Now you're a man of sense and judgment and considerable
business experience, and I want to ask you if you think that is fair.
I came here some sixteen or seventeen years ago and went into the gas
business. It was an open field, the field I undertook to
develop--outlying towns on the North, South, and West sides. Yet the
moment I started the old-line companies began to fight me, though I
wasn't invading their territory at all at the time."

"I remember it well enough," replied Gilgan. "I was one of the men
that helped you to get your Hyde Park franchise. You'd never have got
it if it hadn't been for me. That fellow McKibben," added Gilgan, with
a grin, "a likely chap, him. He always walked as if he had on rubber
shoes. He's with you yet, I suppose?"

"Yes, he's around here somewhere," replied Cowperwood, loftily. "But to
go back to this other matter, most of the men that are behind this
General Electric ordinance and this 'L' road franchise were in the gas
business--Blackman, Jules, Baker, Schryhart, and others--and they are
angry because I came into their field, and angrier still because they
had eventually to buy me out. They're angry because I reorganized
these old-fashioned street-railway companies here and put them on their
feet. Merrill is angry because I didn't run a loop around his store,
and the others are angry because I ever got a loop at all. They're all
angry because I managed to step in and do the things that they should
have done long before. I came here--and that's the whole story in a
nutshell. I've had to have the city council with me to be able to do
anything at all, and becaus