The Titan | Page 5

lost
in Philadelphia, he appreciated almost every suggestion of a delightful
picture in nature.
The tracks, side by side, were becoming more and more numerous.
Freight-cars were assembled here by thousands from all parts of the
country--yellow, red, blue, green, white. (Chicago, he recalled, already
had thirty railroads terminating here, as though it were the end of the
world.) The little low one and two story houses, quite new as to wood,
were frequently unpainted and already smoky --in places grimy. At
grade-crossings, where ambling street-cars and wagons and
muddy-wheeled buggies waited, he noted how flat the streets were,
how unpaved, how sidewalks went up and down rhythmically--here a

flight of steps, a veritable platform before a house, there a long stretch
of boards laid flat on the mud of the prairie itself. What a city!
Presently a branch of the filthy, arrogant, self-sufficient little Chicago
River came into view, with its mass of sputtering tugs, its black, oily
water, its tall, red, brown, and green grain-elevators, its immense black
coal-pockets and yellowish-brown lumber-yards.
Here was life; he saw it at a flash. Here was a seething city in the
making. There was something dynamic in the very air which appealed
to his fancy. How different, for some reason, from Philadelphia! That
was a stirring city, too. He had thought it wonderful at one time, quite a
world; but this thing, while obviously infinitely worse, was better. It
was more youthful, more hopeful. In a flare of morning sunlight
pouring between two coal-pockets, and because the train had stopped to
let a bridge swing and half a dozen great grain and lumber boats go
by--a half-dozen in either direction--he saw a group of Irish stevedores
idling on the bank of a lumber-yard whose wall skirted the water.
Healthy men they were, in blue or red shirt-sleeves, stout straps about
their waists, short pipes in their mouths, fine, hardy, nutty-brown
specimens of humanity. Why were they so appealing, he asked himself.
This raw, dirty town seemed naturally to compose itself into stirring
artistic pictures. Why, it fairly sang! The world was young here. Life
was doing something new. Perhaps he had better not go on to the
Northwest at all; he would decide that question later.
In the mean time he had letters of introduction to distinguished
Chicagoans, and these he would present. He wanted to talk to some
bankers and grain and commission men. The stock-exchange of
Chicago interested him, for the intricacies of that business he knew
backward and forward, and some great grain transactions had been
made here.
The train finally rolled past the shabby backs of houses into a long,
shabbily covered series of platforms--sheds having only roofs--and
amidst a clatter of trucks hauling trunks, and engines belching steam,
and passengers hurrying to and fro he made his way out into Canal
Street and hailed a waiting cab--one of a long line of vehicles that

bespoke a metropolitan spirit. He had fixed on the Grand Pacific as the
most important hotel--the one with the most social significance--and
thither he asked to be driven. On the way he studied these streets as in
the matter of art he would have studied a picture. The little yellow, blue,
green, white, and brown street-cars which he saw trundling here and
there, the tired, bony horses, jingling bells at their throats, touched him.
They were flimsy affairs, these cars, merely highly varnished
kindling-wood with bits of polished brass and glass stuck about them,
but he realized what fortunes they portended if the city grew.
Street-cars, he knew, were his natural vocation. Even more than
stock-brokerage, even more than banking, even more than
stock-organization he loved the thought of street-cars and the vast
manipulative life it suggested.
Chapter II

A Reconnoiter
The city of Chicago, with whose development the personality of Frank
Algernon Cowperwood was soon to be definitely linked! To whom
may the laurels as laureate of this Florence of the West yet fall? This
singing flame of a city, this all America, this poet in chaps and
buckskin, this rude, raw Titan, this Burns of a city! By its shimmering
lake it lay, a king of shreds and patches, a maundering yokel with an
epic in its mouth, a tramp, a hobo among cities, with the grip of Caesar
in its mind, the dramatic force of Euripides in its soul. A very bard of a
city this, singing of high deeds and high hopes, its heavy brogans
buried deep in the mire of circumstance. Take Athens, oh, Greece! Italy,
do you keep Rome! This was the Babylon, the Troy, the Nineveh of a
younger day. Here came the gaping West and the hopeful East to see.
Here hungry men, raw from the shops and fields, idyls and romances in
their minds,