Videra would never have become so confidential with him.
"Huh!" he exclaimed.

"Well, if he says it it's more'n likely so." So Laughlin bought, and Peter Laughlin & Co.

won.
But this grain and commission business, while it was yielding a profit which would average about twenty thousand a year to each partner, was nothing more to Cowperwood than a source of information.
He wanted to "get in" on something that was sure to bring very great returns within a reasonable time and that would not leave him in any such desperate situation as he was at the time of the Chicago fire--spread out very thin, as he put it.

He had interested in his ventures a small group of Chicago men who were watching him--Judah Addison, Alexander Rambaud, Millard Bailey, Anton Videra--men who, although not supreme figures by any means, had free capital.

He knew that he could go to them with any truly sound proposition.