Cowperwood came forward briskly and quickly. He was so calm, so jaunty,
so defiant of life, and yet so courteous to it. These lawyers, this
jury, this straw-and-water judge, these machinations of fate, did not
basically disturb or humble or weaken him. He saw through the mental
equipment of the jury at once. He wanted to assist his counsel in
disturbing and confusing Shannon, but his reason told him that only an
indestructible fabric of fact or seeming would do it. He believed in the
financial rightness of the thing he had done. He was entitled to do it.
Life was war--particularly financial life; and strategy was its keynote,
its duty, its necessity. Why should he bother about petty, picayune
minds which could not understand this? He went over his history for
Steger and the jury, and put the sanest, most comfortable light on it
that he could. He had not gone to Mr. Stener in the first place, he
said--he had been called. He had not urged Mr. Stener to anything. He
had merely shown him and his friends financial possibilities which they
were only too eager to seize upon. And they had seized upon them. (It
was not possible for Shannon to discover at this period how subtly he
had organized his street-car companies so that he could have "shaken
out" Stener and his friends without their being able to voice a single
protest, so he talked of these things as opportunities which he had made
for Stener and others.
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