_ When Frank Algernon Cowperwood emerged from the Eastern District
Penitentiary in Philadelphia he realized that the old life he had
lived in that city since boyhood was ended. His youth was gone,
and with it had been lost the great business prospects of his
earlier manhood. He must begin again.
It would be useless to repeat how a second panic following upon a
tremendous failure--that of Jay Cooke & Co.--had placed a second
fortune in his hands. This restored wealth softened him in some
degree. Fate seemed to have his personal welfare in charge. He
was sick of the stock-exchange, anyhow, as a means of livelihood,
and now decided that he would leave it once and for all. He would
get in something else--street-railways, land deals, some of the
boundless opportunities of the far West. Philadelphia was no
longer pleasing to him. Though now free and rich, he was still a
scandal to the pretenders, and the financial and social world was
not prepared to accept him. He must go his way alone, unaided,
or only secretly so, while his quondam friends watched his career
from afar. So, thinking of this, he took the train one day, his
charming mistress, now only twenty-six, coming to the station to
see him off. He looked at her quite tenderly, for she was the
quintessence of a certain type of feminine beauty.
"By-by, dearie," he smiled, as the train-bell signaled the approaching
departure. "You and I will get out of this shortly. Don't grieve.
I'll be back in two or three weeks, or I'll send for you. I'd
take you now, only I don't know how that country is out there.
We'll fix on some place, and then you watch me settle this fortune
question. We'll not live under a cloud always. I'll get a divorce,
and we'll marry, and things will come right with a bang. Money
will do that."
He looked at her with his large, cool, penetrating eyes, and she
clasped his cheeks between her hands.
"Oh, Frank," she exclaimed, "I'll miss you so! You're all I have."
"In two weeks," he smiled, as the train began to move, "I'll wire
or be back. Be good, sweet."
She followed him with adoring eyes--a fool of love, a spoiled
child, a family pet, amorous, eager, affectionate, the type so
strong a man would naturally like--she tossed her pretty red gold
head and waved him a kiss. Then she walked away with rich, sinuous,
healthy strides--the type that men turn to look after.
"That's her--that's that Butler girl," observed one railroad clerk
to another. "Gee! a man wouldn't want anything better than that,
would he?"
It was the spontaneous tribute that passion and envy invariably
pay to health and beauty. On that pivot swings the world.
Never in all his life until this trip had Cowperwood been farther
west than Pittsburg. His amazing commercial adventures, brilliant
as they were, had been almost exclusively confined to the dull,
staid world of Philadelphia, with its sweet refinement in sections,
its pretensions to American social supremacy, its cool arrogation
of traditional leadership in commercial life, its history,
conservative wealth, unctuous respectability, and all the tastes
and avocations which these imply. He had, as he recalled, almost
mastered that pretty world and made its sacred precincts his own
when the crash came. Practically he had been admitted. Now he
was an Ishmael, an ex-convict, albeit a millionaire. But wait!
The race is to the swift, he said to himself over and over. Yes,
and the battle is to the strong. He would test whether the world
would trample him under foot or no.
Chicago, when it finally dawned on him, came with a rush on the
second morning. He had spent two nights in the gaudy Pullman then
provided--a car intended to make up for some of the inconveniences
of its arrangements by an over-elaboration of plush and tortured
glass--when the first lone outposts of the prairie metropolis began
to appear. The side-tracks along the road-bed over which he was
speeding became more and more numerous, the telegraph-poles more
and more hung with arms and strung smoky-thick with wires. In the
far distance, cityward, was, here and there, a lone working-man's
cottage, the home of some adventurous soul who had planted his
bare hut thus far out in order to reap the small but certain
advantage which the growth of the city would bring.
The land was flat--as flat as a table--with a waning growth of
brown grass left over from the previous year, and stirring faintly
in the morning breeze. Underneath were signs of the new green--the
New Year's flag of its disposition. For some reason a crystalline
atmosphere enfolded the distant hazy outlines of the city, holding
the latter like a fly in amber and giving it an artistic subtlety
which touched him. Already a devotee of art, ambitious for
connoisseurship, who had had his joy, training, and sorrow out of
the collection he had made and lost in Philadelphia, he appreciated
almost every suggestion of a delightful picture in nature.
The tracks, side by side, were becoming more and more numerous.
Freight-cars were assembled here by thousands from all parts of
the country--yellow, red, blue, green, white. (Chicago, he recalled,
already had thirty railroads terminating here, as though it were
the end of the world.) The little low one and two story houses,
quite new as to wood, were frequently unpainted and already smoky
--in places grimy. At grade-crossings, where ambling street-cars
and wagons and muddy-wheeled buggies waited, he noted how flat the
streets were, how unpaved, how sidewalks went up and down
rhythmically--here a flight of steps, a veritable platform before
a house, there a long stretch of boards laid flat on the mud of
the prairie itself. What a city! Presently a branch of the filthy,
arrogant, self-sufficient little Chicago River came into view,
with its mass of sputtering tugs, its black, oily water, its tall,
red, brown, and green grain-elevators, its immense black coal-pockets
and yellowish-brown lumber-yards.
Here was life; he saw it at a flash. Here was a seething city in
the making. There was something dynamic in the very air which
appealed to his fancy. How different, for some reason, from
Philadelphia! That was a stirring city, too. He had thought it
wonderful at one time, quite a world; but this thing, while obviously
infinitely worse, was better. It was more youthful, more hopeful.
In a flare of morning sunlight pouring between two coal-pockets,
and because the train had stopped to let a bridge swing and half
a dozen great grain and lumber boats go by--a half-dozen in either
direction--he saw a group of Irish stevedores idling on the bank
of a lumber-yard whose wall skirted the water. Healthy men they
were, in blue or red shirt-sleeves, stout straps about their waists,
short pipes in their mouths, fine, hardy, nutty-brown specimens
of humanity. Why were they so appealing, he asked himself. This
raw, dirty town seemed naturally to compose itself into stirring
artistic pictures. Why, it fairly sang! The world was young here.
Life was doing something new. Perhaps he had better not go on
to the Northwest at all; he would decide that question later.
In the mean time he had letters of introduction to distinguished
Chicagoans, and these he would present. He wanted to talk to some
bankers and grain and commission men. The stock-exchange of Chicago
interested him, for the intricacies of that business he knew
backward and forward, and some great grain transactions had been
made here.
The train finally rolled past the shabby backs of houses into a
long, shabbily covered series of platforms--sheds having only
roofs--and amidst a clatter of trucks hauling trunks, and engines
belching steam, and passengers hurrying to and fro he made his way
out into Canal Street and hailed a waiting cab--one of a long line
of vehicles that bespoke a metropolitan spirit. He had fixed on
the Grand Pacific as the most important hotel--the one with the
most social significance--and thither he asked to be driven. On
the way he studied these streets as in the matter of art he would
have studied a picture. The little yellow, blue, green, white,
and brown street-cars which he saw trundling here and there, the
tired, bony horses, jingling bells at their throats, touched him.
They were flimsy affairs, these cars, merely highly varnished
kindling-wood with bits of polished brass and glass stuck about
them, but he realized what fortunes they portended if the city
grew. Street-cars, he knew, were his natural vocation. Even more
than stock-brokerage, even more than banking, even more than
stock-organization he loved the thought of street-cars and the
vast manipulative life it suggested. _