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he may come out all right at that."
Cowperwood hurried to his own home only to find his father awake and brooding. To him he
talked with that strong vein of sympathy and understanding which is usually characteristic of
those drawn by ties of flesh and blood. He liked his father. He sympathized with his painstaking
effort to get up in the world. He could not forget that as a boy he had had the loving sympathy
and interest of his father. The loan which he had from the Third National, on somewhat weak
Union Street Railway shares he could probably replace if stocks did not drop too tremendously.
He must replace this at all costs. But his father's investments in street-railways, which had risen
with his own ventures, and which now involved an additional two hundred thousand--how could
he protect those? The shares were hypothecated and the money was used for other things.
Additional collateral would have to be furnished the several banks carrying them. It was nothing
except loans, loans, loans, and the need of protecting them. If he could only get an additional
deposit of two or three hundred thousand dollars from Stener. But that, in the face of possible
financial difficulties, was rank criminality. All depended on the morrow.
Monday, the ninth, dawned gray and cheerless. He was up with the first ray of light, shaved and
dressed, and went over, under the gray-green pergola, to his father's house. He was up, also,
and stirring about, for he had not been able to sleep. His gray eyebrows and gray hair looked
rather shaggy and disheveled, and his side-whiskers anything but decorative. The old
gentleman's eyes were tired, and his face was gray. Cowperwood could see that he was
worrying. He looked up from a small, ornate escritoire of buhl, which Ellsworth had found
somewhere, and where he was quietly tabulating a list of his resources and liabilities.
Cowperwood winced. He hated to see his father worried, but he could not help it. He had hoped
sincerely, when they built their houses together, that the days of worry for his father had gone
forever.
"Counting up?" he asked, familiarly, with a smile. He wanted to hearten the old gentleman as
much as possible.
"I was just running over my affairs again to see where I stood in case--" He looked quizzically at
his son, and Frank smiled again.
"I wouldn't worry, father. I told you how I fixed it so that Butler and that crowd will support the
market. I have Rivers and Targool and Harry Eltinge on 'change helping me sell out, and they
are the best men there. They'll handle the situation carefully. I couldn't trust Ed or Joe in this
case, for the moment they began to sell everybody would know what was going on with me.
This way my men will seem like bears hammering the market, but not hammering too hard. I
ought to be able to unload enough at ten points off to raise five hundred thousand. The market
may not go lower than that. You can't tell. It isn't going to sink indefinitely. If I just knew what the
big insurance companies were going to do! The morning paper hasn't come yet, has it?"
He was going to pull a bell, but remembered that the servants would scarcely be up as yet. He
went to the front door himself. There were the Press and the Public Ledger lying damp from the
presses. He picked them up and glanced at the front pages. His countenance fell. On one, the
Press, was spread a great black map of Chicago, a most funereal-looking thing, the black
portion indicating the burned section. He had never seen a map of Chicago before in just this
clear, definite way. That white portion was Lake Michigan, and there was the Chicago River
dividing the city into three almost equal portions--the north side, the west side, the south side.
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