Mr. Gilgan, safe in his own subtlety, was ready with a toll of the supposed recalcitrants. They must fight their own battles. Mr. Hand wrote down the names, determining meanwhile to bring pressure to bear. He decided also to watch Mr. Gilgan. If there should prove to be a hitch in the programme the newspapers should be informed and commanded to thunder appropriately. Such aldermen as proved unfaithful to the great trust imposed on them should be smoked out, followed back to the wards which had elected them, and exposed to the people who were behind them. Their names should be pilloried in the public press. The customary hints as to Cowperwood’s deviltry and trickery should be redoubled. But in the mean time Messrs. Stimson, Avery, McKibben, Van Sickle, and others were on Cowperwood’s behalf acting separately upon various unattached aldermen—those not temperamentally and chronically allied with the reform idea—and making them understand that if they could find it possible to refrain from supporting anti-Cowperwood measures for the next two years, a bonus in the shape of an annual salary of two thousand dollars or a gift in some other form—perhaps a troublesome note indorsed or a mortgage taken care of—would be forthcoming, together with a guarantee that the general public should never know. In no case was such an offer made direct. Friends or neighbors, or suave unidentified strangers, brought mysterious messages. By this method some eleven aldermen—quite apart from the ten regular Democrats who, because of McKenty and his influence, could be counted upon—had been already suborned. Although Schryhart, Hand, and Arneel did not know it, their plans—even as they planned—were being thus undermined, and, try as they would, the coveted ordinance for a blanket franchise persistently eluded them. They had to content themselves for the time being with a franchise for a single ‘L’ road line on the South Side in Schryhart’s own territory, and with a franchise to the General Electric covering only one unimportant line, which it would be easy for Cowperwood, if he continued in power, to take over at some later time. CHAPTER XL. A Trip to Louisville