f you want to. Givin' you fifty-one per cent. gives
you charge of this here shebang. All right, though; I ain't a-kickin'.
I guess I can manage allus to git what's a-comin' to me.

"It's a bargain, then," said Cowperwood. "We'll want new offices,
Laughlin, don't you think? This one's a little dark."

"Fix it up any way you like, Mr. Cowperwood. It's all the same to me.
I'll be glad to see how yer do it."

In a week the details were completed, and two weeks later the sign of
Peter Laughlin & Co., grain and commission merchants, appeared over the
door of a handsome suite of rooms on the ground floor of a corner at La
Salle and Madison, in the heart of the Chicago financial district.

"Get onto old Laughlin, will you?" one broker observed to another, as
they passed the new, pretentious commission-house with its splendid
plate-glass windows, and observed the heavy, ornate bronze sign placed
on either side of the door, which was located exactly on the corner.
"What's struck him? I thought he was almost all through. Who's the
Company?"

"I don't know. Some fellow from the East, I think."

"Well, he's certainly moving up. Look at the plate glass, will you?"

It was thus that Frank Algernon Cowperwood's Chicago financial career
was definitely launched.

Chapter V

Concerning A Wife And Family

If any one fancies for a moment that this commercial move on the part
of Cowperwood was either hasty or ill-considered they but little
appreciate the incisive, apprehensive psychology of the man. His
thoughts as to life and control (tempered and hardened by thirteen
months of reflection in the Eastern District Penitentiary) had given
him a fixed policy. He could, should, and would rule alone. No man
must ever again have the least claim on him save that of a suppliant.
He wanted no more dangerous combinations such as he had had with
Stener, the man through whom he had lost so much in Philadelphia, and
others. By right of financial intellect and courage he was first, and
would so prove it. Men must swing around him as planets around the sun.

Moreover, since his fall from grace in Philadelphia he had come to
think that never again, perhaps, could he hope to become socially
acceptable in the sense in which the so-called best society of a city
interprets the phrase; and pondering over this at odd moments, he
realized that his future allies in all probability would not be among
the rich and socially important--