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Updated: June 6, 2025
He, too, was thinking how useless it was for any one to approach a group of politicians with a proposition like this, particularly in a crisis such as bid fair to occur. He reflected that if he and Butler and Mollenhauer could get together and promise Cowperwood protection in return for the surrender of his street-railway holdings it would be a very different matter.
Yet all at once one winter's day, and out of a clear sky, the papers were full of an enormous financial crash of which he was the center. According to the newspapers, the first and foremost of a chain of banks of which he was the head, to say nothing of a bonding and realty company and some street-railway project on Long Island, were all involved in the crash.
His one pet idea, the thing he put more faith in than anything else, was his street-railway manipulations, and particularly his actual control of the Seventeenth and Nineteenth Street line.
His father, a former heavy stockholder of this company, had recently died and left all his holdings and practically his directorship to his only son. Young Kaffrath was by no means a practical street-railway man, though he fancied he could do very well at it if given a chance.
A versatile and entertaining companion, by turns prosperous and impecunious, and an optimist always, Gardiner Hubbard became a really indispensable factor as the first advance agent of the telephone business. No other citizen had done more for the city of Cambridge than Hubbard. It was he who secured gas for Cambridge in 1853, and pure water, and a street-railway to Boston.
The most serious difficulty confronting Cowperwood from now on was really not so much political as financial. In building up and financing his Chicago street-railway enterprises he had, in those days when Addison was president of the Lake City National, used that bank as his chief source of supply.
Mollenhauer and Simpson had to consult him, as he could make very uncertain the disposition of some hundred and fifteen thousand votes, a large number of which were fraudulent, but which fact did not modify their deadly character on occasion. Butler's sons disappeared as possible political factors, and were compelled to confine themselves to the street-railway and contracting business.
A young florist, with a pale face, a wide speculative forehead, and anemic hands, struck him as being sufficiently impressionable to his personal charm to be worth while. He whispered as much to Steger. There was a shrewd Jew, a furrier, who was challenged because he had read all of the news of the panic and had lost two thousand dollars in street-railway stocks.
Curiously, although no derogatory mention had previously been made of him, the articles and editorials were now most vituperative. Their venom was especially noticeable. He was a get-rich-quick villain of the vilest stripe; he had been juggling a bank, a trust company, an insurance company and a land and street-railway speculative scheme as one would glass balls.
What was amiss, therefore, with himself and Stener and with Cowperwood as their or rather Stener's secret representative, since Strobik did not dare to appear in the matter buying now sufficient street-railway shares in some one line to control it, and then, if he, Strobik, could, by efforts of his own, get the city council to set aside certain streets for its extension, why, there you were they would own it.
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