in small amounts at more than
ninety, at the same time creating the impression that it was going to
be a prosperous investment. The certificates gradually rose and were
unloaded in rising amounts until one hundred was reached, when all
the two hundred thousand dollars' worth--two thousand certificates in
all--was fed out in small lots. Stener was satisfied. Two hundred shares
had been carried for him and sold at one hundred, which netted him
two thousand dollars. It was illegitimate gain, unethical; but his
conscience was not very much troubled by that. He had none, truly. He
saw visions of a halcyon future.

It is difficult to make perfectly clear what a subtle and significant
power this suddenly placed in the hands of Cowperwood. Consider that he
was only twenty-eight--nearing twenty-nine. Imagine yourself by nature
versed in the arts of finance, capable of playing with sums of money in
the forms of stocks, certificates, bonds, and cash, as the ordinary man
plays with checkers or chess. Or, better yet, imagine yourself one of
those subtle masters of the mysteries of the higher forms of
chess--the type of mind so well illustrated by the famous and historic
chess-players, who could sit with their backs to a group of rivals
playing fourteen men at once, calling out all the moves in turn,
remembering all the positions of all the men on all the boards, and
winning. This, of course, would be an overstatement of the subtlety of
Cowperwood at this time, and yet it would not be wholly out of bounds.
He knew instinctively what could be done with a given sum of money--how
as cash it could be deposited in one place, and yet as credit and the
basis of moving checks, used in not one but many other places at the
same time. When properly watched and followed this manipulation gave him
the constructive and purchasing power of ten and a dozen times as much
as his original sum might have represented. He knew instinctively the
principles of "pyramiding" and "kiting." He could see exactly not only
how he could raise and lower the value of these certificates of loan,
day after day and year after year--if he were so fortunate as to retain
his hold on the city treasurer--but also how this would give him a
credit with the banks hitherto beyond his wildest dreams. His father's
bank was one of the first to profit by this and to extend him loans. The
various local politicians and bosses--Mollenhauer, Butler, Simpson, and
others--seeing the succe