The powerhouses were completed and the system was started, even while the contracts for the changes on the West Side were being let.
Schryhart and his associates were amazed at this swiftness of action, this dizzy phantasmagoria of financial operations.

It looked very much to the conservative traction interests of Chicago as if this young giant out of the East had it in mind to eat up the whole city.

The Chicago Trust Company, which he, Addison, McKenty, and others had organized to manipulate the principal phases of the local bond issues, and of which he was rumored to be in control, was in a flourishing condition.

Apparently he could now write his check for millions, and yet he was not beholden, so far as the older and more conservative multimillionaires of Chicago were concerned, to any one of them.

The worst of it was that this Cowperwood--an upstart, a jail-bird, a stranger whom they had done their best to suppress financially and ostracize socially, had now become an attractive, even a sparkling figure in the eyes of the Chicago public.