“By Gosh! Frank, I think I know exactly what them fellers are trying to do,” Laughlin would frequently remark of a morning, after he had lain in his lonely Harrison Street bed meditating the major portion of the night. “That there Stock Yards gang” (and by gang he meant most of the great manipulators, like Arneel, Hand, Schryhart and others) “are after corn again. We want to git long o’ that now, or I miss my guess. What do you think, huh?” Cowperwood, schooled by now in many Western subtleties which he had not previously known, and daily becoming wiser, would as a rule give an instantaneous decision. “You’re right. Risk a hundred thousand bushels. I think New York Central is going to drop a point or two in a few days. We’d better go short a point.” Laughlin could never figure out quite how it was that Cowperwood always seemed to know and was ready to act quite as quickly in local matters as he was himself. He understood his wisdom concerning Eastern shares and things dealt in on the Eastern exchange, but these Chicago matters? “Whut makes you think that?” he asked Cowperwood, one day, quite curiously. “Why, Peter,” Cowperwood replied, quite simply, “Anton Videra” (one of the directors of the Wheat and Corn Bank) “was in here yesterday while you were on ’change, and he was telling me.” He described a situation which Videra had outlined. Laughlin knew Videra as a strong, wealthy Pole who had come up in the last few years. It was strange how Cowperwood naturally got in with these wealthy men and won their confidence so quickly. Videra would never have become so confidential with him. “Huh!” he exclaimed. “Well, if he says it it’s more’n likely so.” So Laughlin bought, and Peter Laughlin & Co. won. But this grain and commission business, while it was yielding a profit which would average about twenty thousand a year to each partner, was nothing more to Cowperwood than a source of information. He wanted to “get in” on something that was sure to bring very great returns within a reasonable time and that would not leave him in any such desperate situation as he was at the time of the Chicago fire—spread out very thin, as he put it. He had interested in his ventures a small group of Chicago men who were watching him—Judah Addison, Alexander Rambaud, Millard Bailey, Anton Videra—men who, although not supreme figures by any means, had free capital. He knew that he could go to them with any truly sound proposition. The one thing that most attracted his attention was the Chicago gas situation, because there was a chance to step in almost unheralded in an as yet unoccupied territory; with franchises once secured—the reader can quite imagine how—he could present himself, like a Hamilcar Barca in the heart of Spain or a Hannibal at the gates of Rome, with a demand for surrender and a division of spoils.