“You see what it is, father,” he said, dramatically, after a time.  “Cowperwood’s been using this money of Stener’s to pick up stocks, and he’s in a hole.  If it hadn’t been for this fire he’d have got away with it; but now he wants you and Simpson and Mollenhauer and the others to pull him out.  He’s a nice fellow, and I like him fairly well; but you’re a fool if you do as he wants you to.  He has more than belongs to him already.  I heard the other day that he has the Front Street line, and almost all of Green and Coates; and that he and Stener own the Seventeenth and Nineteenth; but I didn’t believe it.  I’ve been intending to ask you about it.  I think Cowperwood has a majority for himself stowed away somewhere in every instance.  Stener is just a pawn.  He moves him around where he pleases.”

Owen’s eyes gleamed avariciously, opposingly.  Cowperwood ought to be punished, sold out, driven out of the street-railway business in which Owen was anxious to rise.

“Now you know,” observed Butler, thickly and solemnly, “I always thought that young felly was clever, but I hardly thought he was as clever as all that.  So that’s his game.  You’re pretty shrewd yourself, aren’t you?  Well, we can fix that, if we think well of it.  But there’s more than that to all this.  You don’t want to forget the Republican party.  Our success goes with the success of that, you know”—­and he paused and looked at his son.  “If Cowperwood should fail and that money couldn’t be put back—­” He broke off abstractedly.  “The thing that’s troublin’ me is this matter of Stener and the city treasury.  If somethin’ ain’t done about that, it may go hard with the party this fall, and with some of our contracts.  You don’t want to forget that an election is comin’ along in November.  I’m wonderin’ if I ought to call in that one hundred thousand dollars.  It’s goin’ to take considerable money to meet my loans in the mornin’.”

It is a curious matter of psychology, but it was only now that the real difficulties of the situation were beginning to dawn on Butler.  In the presence of Cowperwood he was so influenced by that young man’s personality and his magnetic presentation of his need and his own liking for him that he had not stopped to consider all the phases of his own relationship to the situation.  Out here in the cool night air, talking to Owen, who was ambitious on his own account and anything but sentimentally considerate of Cowperwood, he was beginning to sober down and see things in their true light.  He had to admit that Cowperwood had seriously compromised the city treasury and the Republican party, and incidentally Butler’s own private interests.  Nevertheless, he liked Cowperwood.  He was in no way prepared to desert him.  He was now going to see Mollenhauer and Simpson as much to save Cowperwood really as the party and his own affairs.  And yet a scandal.  He did not like that—­resented it.  This young scalawag!  To think he should be so sly.  None the less he still liked him, even here and now, and was feeling that he ought to do something to help the young man, if anything could help him.  He might even leave his hundred-thousand-dollar loan with him until the last hour, as Cowperwood had requested, if the others were friendly.