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. Cowperwood had heard all about this new electric system some time before, and had been studying it for several years with the greatest interest, since it promised to revolutionize the whole business of street-railroading. However, having but so recently completed his excellent cable system, he did not see that it was advisable to throw it away. The trolley was as yet too much of a novelty; certainly it was not advisable to have it introduced into Chicago until he was ready to introduce it himself—first on his outlying feeder lines, he thought, then perhaps generally.