“Don’t you think you will like that?” he asked his wife, referring to his plans for entertaining.

She smiled wanly.  “I suppose so,” she said.

Chapter XVI

It was not long after the arrangement between Treasurer Stener and Cowperwood had been made that the machinery for the carrying out of that political-financial relationship was put in motion.  The sum of two hundred and ten thousand dollars in six per cent. interest-bearing certificates, payable in ten years, was set over to the credit of Cowperwood & Co. on the books of the city, subject to his order.  Then, with proper listing, he began to offer it in small amounts at more than ninety, at the same time creating the impression that it was going to be a prosperous investment.  The certificates gradually rose and were unloaded in rising amounts until one hundred was reached, when all the two hundred thousand dollars’ worth—­two thousand certificates in all—­was fed out in small lots.  Stener was satisfied.  Two hundred shares had been carried for him and sold at one hundred, which netted him two thousand dollars.  It was illegitimate gain, unethical; but his conscience was not very much troubled by that.  He had none, truly.  He saw visions of a halcyon future.

It is difficult to make perfectly clear what a subtle and significant power this suddenly placed in the hands of Cowperwood.  Consider that he was only twenty-eight—­nearing twenty-nine.  Imagine yourself by nature versed in the arts of finance, capable of playing with sums of money in the forms of stocks, certificates, bonds, and cash, as the ordinary man plays with checkers or chess.  Or, better yet, imagine yourself one of those subtle masters of the mysteries of the higher forms of chess—­the type of mind so well illustrated by the famous and historic chess-players, who could sit with their backs to a group of rivals playing fourteen men at once, calling out all the moves in turn, remembering all the positions of all the men on all the boards, and winning.  This, of course, would be an overstatement of the subtlety of Cowperwood at this time, and yet it would not be wholly out of bounds.  He knew instinctively what could be done with a given sum of money—­how as cash it could be deposited in one place, and yet as credit and the basis of moving checks, used in not one but many other places at the same time.  When properly watched and followed this manipulation gave him the constructive and purchasing power of ten and a dozen times as much as his original sum might have represented.  He knew instinctively the principles of “pyramiding” and “kiting.”  He could see exactly not only how he could raise and lower the value of these certificates of loan, day after day and year after year—­if he were so fortunate as to retain his hold on the city treasurer—­but also how this would give him a credit with the banks hitherto beyond his wildest dreams.  His father’s