ly modified account he had furnished the newspapers some time
before. Though conspiracy and bribery are ugly words, still lawyers'
charges prove nothing. But a penitentiary record, for whatever reason
served, coupled with previous failure, divorce, and scandal (though the
newspapers made only the most guarded reference to all this), served to
whet public interest and to fix Cowperwood and his wife in the public
eye.

Cowperwood himself was solicited for an interview, but his answer was
that he was merely a financial agent for the three new companies, not
an investor; and that the charges, in so far as he was concerned, were
untrue, mere legal fol-de-rol trumped up to make the situation as
annoying as possible. He threatened to sue for libel. Nevertheless,
although these suits eventually did come to nothing (for he had fixed
it so that he could not be traced save as a financial agent in each
case), yet the charges had been made, and he was now revealed as a
shrewd, manipulative factor, with a record that was certainly
spectacular.

"I see," said Anson Merrill to his wife, one morning at breakfast,
"that this man Cowperwood is beginning to get his name in the papers."
He had the Times on the table before him, and was looking at a headline
which, after the old-fashioned pyramids then in vogue, read:
"Conspiracy charged against various Chicago citizens. Frank Algernon
Cowperwood, Judson P. Van Sickle, Henry De Soto Sippens, and others
named in Circuit Court complaint." It went on to specify other facts.
"I supposed he was just a broker."

"I don't know much about them," replied his wife, "except what Bella
Simms tells me. What does it say?"

He handed her the paper.

"I have always thought they were merely climbers," continued Mrs.
Merrill. "From what I hear she is impossible. I never saw her."

"He begins well for a Philadelphian," smiled Merrill. "I've seen him
at the Calumet. He looks like a very shrewd man to me. He's going
about his work in a brisk spirit, anyhow."

Similarly Mr. Norman Schryhart, a man who up to this time had taken no
thought of Cowperwood, although he had noted his appearance about the
halls of the Calumet and Union League Clubs, began to ask seriously who
he was. Schryhart, a man of great physical and mental vigor, six feet
tall, hale and stolid as an ox, a very different type of man from Anson
Merrill, met Addison one day at the Calumet Club shortly after the
newspaper talk began