him one J. J. Bergdoll, a noble hireling, long-haired and dusty,
ostensibly president of the Hyde Park Gas and Fuel Company, conferring
with Councilman Alfred B. Davis, manufacturer of willow and rattan
ware, and Mr. Patrick Gilgan, saloon-keeper, arranging a prospective
distribution of shares, offering certain cash consideration, lots,
favors, and the like. Observe also in the village of Douglas and West
Park on the West Side, just over the city line, the angular, humorous
Peter Laughlin and Burton Stimson arranging a similar deal or deals.

The enemy, the city gas companies, being divided into three factions,
were in no way prepared for what was now coming. When the news finally
leaked out that applications for franchises had been made to the
several corporate village bodies each old company suspected the other
of invasion, treachery, robbery. Pettifogging lawyers were sent, one
by each company, to the village council in each particular territory
involved, but no one of the companies had as yet the slightest idea who
was back of it all or of the general plan of operations. Before any
one of them could reasonably protest, before it could decide that it
was willing to pay a very great deal to have the suburb adjacent to its
particular territory left free, before it could organize a legal fight,
councilmanic ordinances were introduced giving the applying company
what it sought; and after a single reading in each case and one open
hearing, as the law compelled, they were almost unanimously passed.
There were loud cries of dismay from minor suburban papers which had
almost been forgotten in the arrangement of rewards. The large city
newspapers cared little at first, seeing these were outlying districts;
they merely made the comment that the villages were beginning well,
following in the steps of the city council in its distinguished career
of crime.

Cowperwood smiled as he saw in the morning papers the announcement of
the passage of each ordinance granting him a franchise. He listened
with comfort thereafter on many a day to accounts by Laughlin, Sippens,
McKibben, and Van Sickle of overtures made to buy them out, or to take
over their franchises. He worked on plans with Sippens looking to the
actual introduction of gas-plants. There were bond issues now to float,
stock to be marketed, contracts for supplies to be awarded, actual
reservoirs and tanks to be built, and pipes to be laid. A pumped-up
public opposition