cuit judge, and also as district attorney, rendered various
decisions which had made him very unpopular with the rich and
powerful--decisions in damage cases, fraud cases, railroad claim cases,
where the city or the state was seeking to oust various powerful
railway corporations from possession of property--yards,
water-frontages, and the like, to which they had no just claim. At the
same time the populace, reading the news items of his doings and
hearing him speak on various and sundry occasions, conceived a great
fancy for him. He was primarily soft-hearted, sweet-minded, fiery, a
brilliant orator, a dynamic presence. In addition he was
woman-hungry--a phase which homely, sex-starved intellectuals the world
over will understand, to the shame of a lying age, that because of
quixotic dogma belies its greatest desire, its greatest sorrow, its
greatest joy. All these factors turned an ultra-conservative element
in the community against him, and he was considered dangerous. At the
same time he had by careful economy and investment built up a fair
sized fortune. Recently, however, owing to the craze for sky-scrapers,
he had placed much of his holdings in a somewhat poorly constructed and
therefore unprofitable office building. Because of this error
financial wreck was threatening him. Even now he was knocking at the
doors of large bonding companies for assistance.

This man, in company with the antagonistic financial element and the
newspapers, constituted, as regards Cowperwood's
public-service-commission scheme, a triumvirate of difficulties not
easy to overcome. The newspapers, in due time, catching wind of the
true purport of the plan, ran screaming to their readers with the
horrible intelligence. In the offices of Schryhart, Arneel, Hand, and
Merrill, as well as in other centers of finance, there was considerable
puzzling over the situation, and then a shrewd, intelligent deduction
was made.

"Do you see what he's up to, Hosmer?" inquired Schryhart of Hand. "He
sees that we have him scotched here in Chicago. As things stand now he
can't go into the city council and ask for a franchise for more than
twenty years under the state law, and he can't do that for three or
four years yet, anyhow. His franchises don't expire soon enough. He
knows that by the time they do expire we will have public sentiment
aroused to such a point that no council, however crooked it may be,
will dare to give him what he asks unles