第102章 Chapter XXX Obstacles(2)

"One million dollars!" exclaimed Cowperwood. "Don't you think that's a little steep, Mr. Purdy?"

"No," replied Purdy, sagely. "It's not any more than it's worth."

Cowperwood sighed.

"I'm sorry," he replied, meditatively, "but this is really too much. Wouldn't you take three hundred thousand dollars in cash now and consider this thing closed?"

"One million," replied Purdy, looking sternly at the ceiling.

"Very well, Mr. Purdy," replied Cowperwood. "I'm very sorry.

It's plain to me that we can't do business as I had hoped. I'm willing to pay you a reasonable sum; but what you ask is far too much--preposterous! Don't you think you'd better reconsider? We might move the tunnel even yet."

"One million dollars," said Purdy.

"It can't be done, Mr. Purdy. It isn't worth it. Why won't you be fair? Call it three hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars cash, and my check to-night."

"I wouldn't take five or six hundred thousand dollars if you were to offer it to me, Mr. Cowperwood, to-night or any other time. I know my rights."

"Very well, then," replied Cowperwood, "that's all I can say. If you won't sell, you won't sell. Perhaps you'll change your mind later."

Mr. Purdy went out, and Cowperwood called in his lawyers and his engineers. One Saturday afternoon, a week or two later, when the building in question had been vacated for the day, a company of three hundred laborers, with wagons, picks, shovels, and dynamite sticks, arrived. By sundown of the next day (which, being Sunday, was a legal holiday, with no courts open or sitting to issue injunctions) this comely structure, the private property of Mr.

Redmond Purdy, was completely razed and a large excavation substituted in its stead. The gentleman of the celluloid cuffs and collars, when informed about nine o'clock of this same Sunday morning that his building had been almost completely removed, was naturally greatly perturbed. A portion of the wall was still standing when he arrived, hot and excited, and the police were appealed to.

But, strange to say, this was of little avail, for they were shown a writ of injunction issued by the court of highest jurisdiction, presided over by the Hon. Nahum Dickensheets, which restrained all and sundry from interfering. (Subsequently on demand of another court this remarkable document was discovered to have disappeared; the contention was that it had never really existed or been produced at all.)

The demolition and digging proceeded. Then began a scurrying of lawyers to the door of one friendly judge after another. There were apoplectic cheeks, blazing eyes, and gasps for breath while the enormity of the offense was being noised abroad. Law is law, however. Procedure is procedure, and no writ of injunction was either issuable or returnable on a legal holiday, when no courts were sitting. Nevertheless, by three o'clock in the afternoon an obliging magistrate was found who consented to issue an injunction staying this terrible crime. By this time, however, the building was gone, the excavation complete. It remained merely for the West Chicago Street Railway Company to secure an injunction vacating the first injunction, praying that its rights, privileges, liberties, etc., be not interfered with, and so creating a contest which naturally threw the matter into the State Court of Appeals, where it could safely lie. For several years there were numberless injunctions, writs of errors, doubts, motions to reconsider, threats to carry the matter from the state to the federal courts on a matter of constitutional privilege, and the like. The affair was finally settled out of court, for Mr. Purdy by this time was a more sensible man. In the mean time, however, the newspapers had been given full details of the transaction, and a storm of words against Cowperwood ensued.

But more disturbing than the Redmond Purdy incident was the rivalry of a new Chicago street-railway company. It appeared first as an idea in the brain of one James Furnivale Woolsen, a determined young Westerner from California, and developed by degrees into consents and petitions from fully two-thirds of the residents of various streets in the extreme southwest section of the city where it was proposed the new line should be located. This same James Furnivale Woolsen, being an ambitious person, was not to be so easily put down. Besides the consent and petitions, which Cowperwood could not easily get away from him, he had a new form of traction then being tried out in several minor cities--a form of electric propulsion by means of an overhead wire and a traveling pole, which was said to be very economical, and to give a service better than cables and cheaper even than horses.