In the meantime, the Consolidated Illuminating and Power Company went pompously on. The great combine was formed, the fifty million dollars' worth of stock was opened for subscription, and the company gave a vastly expensive banquet in the convention hall of the Hotel Spender, at which a thousand of the city's foremost men were entertained, and where the cleverest after-dinner speakers to be obtained talked in relays until long after midnight. Those who came to eat the rich food and drink the rare wine and lend their countenances to the stupendous local enterprise, being shrewd business graduates who had cut their eye-teeth in their cradles, smiled and went home without any thought of investing; but the hard-working, economical chaps of the offices and shops, men who felt elated if, after five years of slavery, they could show ten hundred dollars of savings, glanced in awe over this magnificent list of names in the next day's papers. If the stock of the Consolidated Illuminating and Power Company was considered a good investment by these generals and captains and lieutenants of finance, who, of course, attended this Arabian Nights banquet as investors, it must certainly be a good investment for the corporals and privates. Immediately vivid results were shown. Immense electric signs, furnished at less than cost and some of them as big as the buildings upon the roofs of which they were erected, began to make constellations in the city sky; buildings in the principal down-town squares were studded, for little or nothing, with outside incandescent lights as thickly as wall space could be found for them, and the men whose only automobiles are street-cars awoke to the fact that their city was becoming intensely metropolitan; that it was blazing with the blaze of Paris and London and New York; that all this glittering advancement was due to the great new Consolidated Illuminating and Power Company, and more applications for stock were made! Every applicant was supplied, but the treasury stock of the company having been sold out, the scrip had to come from some place else, and it came through devious, secret ways from the holdings of such men as Stone and Garland and Sharpe. During the grand orgie of illumination the election came on; the price of gas and electricity went gloriously and recklessly down, and the men who were identified with the triumphantly successful new illuminating company were the leading figures in the campaign. The puerile "reform party," the blunders of whose incompetence had been ridiculous, was swept out of existence; Garland was elected mayor by the most overwhelming majority that had ever been known in the city, and with him was elected a council of the same political faith. Sam Stone, always in the background, always keeping his name out of the papers as much as possible, came once more to the throne, and owned the city and all its inhabitants and all its business enterprises and all its public utilities, body and soul.