Similarly Hand, meeting Arneel not so long afterward, confided to him that Cowperwood was trying to repudiate a sacred agreement. Arneel was grieved and surprised. It was enough for him to know that Hand had been seriously injured. Between the two of them they now decided to indicate to Addison, as president of the Lake City Bank, that all relations with Cowperwood and the Chicago Trust Company must cease. The result of this was, not long after, that Addison, very suave and gracious, agreed to give Cowperwood due warning that all his loans would have to be taken care of and then resigned—to become, seven months later, president of the Chicago Trust Company. This desertion created a great stir at the time, astonishing the very men who had suspected that it might come to pass. The papers were full of it. “Well, let him go,” observed Arneel to Hand, sourly, on the day that Addison notified the board of directors of the Lake City of his contemplated resignation. “If he wants to sever his connection with a bank like this to go with a man like that, it’s his own lookout. He may live to regret it.” It so happened that by now another election was pending Chicago, and Hand, along with Schryhart and Arneel—who joined their forces because of his friendship for Hand—decided to try to fight Cowperwood through this means. Hosmer Hand, feeling that he had the burden of a great duty upon him, was not slow in acting. He was always, when aroused, a determined and able fighter. Needing an able lieutenant in the impending political conflict, he finally bethought himself of a man who had recently come to figure somewhat conspicuously in Chicago politics—one Patrick Gilgan, the same Patrick Gilgan of Cowperwood’s old Hyde Park gas-war days. Mr. Gilgan was now a comparatively well-to-do man. Owing to a genial capacity for mixing with people, a close mouth, and absolutely no understanding of, and consequently no conscience in matters of large public import (in so far as they related to the so-called rights of the mass), he was a fit individual to succeed politically. His saloon was the finest in all Wentworth Avenue. It fairly glittered with the newly introduced incandescent lamp reflected in a perfect world of beveled and faceted mirrors. His ward, or district, was full of low, rain-beaten cottages crowded together along half-made streets; but Patrick Gilgan was now a state senator, slated for Congress at the next Congressional election, and a possible successor of the Hon. John J. McKenty as dictator of the city, if only the Republican party should come into power. (Hyde Park, before it had been annexed to the city, had always been Republican, and since then, although the larger city was normally Democratic, Gilgan could not conveniently change.) Hearing from the political discussion which preceded the election that Gilgan was by far the most powerful politician on the South Side, Hand sent for him. Personally, Hand had far less sympathy with the polite