The Making of Bobby Burnit / Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man

by George Randolph Chester

“It isn’t; but it will happen, nevertheless,” he declared with conviction.

He had already begun to spend his days and nights in apprehension of this, and as the weeks went on and nothing happened his apprehension grew rather than diminished.

In the meantime, the Consolidated Illuminating and Power Company went pompously on. The great combine was formed, the fifty million dollars’ worth of stock was opened for subscription, and the company gave a vastly expensive banquet in the convention hall of the Hotel Spender, at which a thousand of the city’s foremost men were entertained, and where the cleverest after-dinner speakers to be obtained talked in relays until long after midnight. Those who came to eat the rich food and drink the rare wine and lend their countenances to the stupendous local enterprise, being shrewd business graduates who had cut their eye-teeth in their cradles, smiled and went home without any thought of investing; but the hard-working, economical chaps of the offices and shops, men who felt elated if, after five years of slavery, they could show ten hundred dollars of savings, glanced in awe over this magnificent list of names in the next day’s papers. If the stock of the Consolidated Illuminating and Power Company was considered a good investment by these generals and captains and lieutenants of finance, who, of course, attended this Arabian Nights banquet as investors, it must certainly be a good investment for the corporals and privates.

Immediately vivid results were shown. Immense electric signs, furnished at less than cost and some of them as big as the buildings upon the roofs of which they were erected, began to make constellations in the city sky; buildings in the principal down-town squares were studded, for little or nothing, with outside incandescent lights as thickly as wall space could be found for them, and the men whose only automobiles are street-cars awoke to the fact that their city was becoming intensely metropolitan; that it was blazing with the blaze of Paris and London and New York; that all this glittering advancement was due to the great new Consolidated Illuminating and Power Company, and more applications for stock were made!

Every applicant was supplied, but the treasury stock of the company having been sold out, the scrip had to come from some place else, and it came through devious, secret ways from the holdings of such men as Stone and Garland and Sharpe.

During the grand orgie of illumination the election came on; the price of gas and electricity went gloriously and recklessly down, and the men who were identified with the triumphantly successful new illuminating company were the leading figures in the campaign. The puerile “reform party,” the blunders of whose incompetence had been ridiculous, was swept out of existence; Garland was elected mayor by the most overwhelming majority that had ever been known in the city, and with him was elected a council of the same political faith. Sam Stone, always in the background, always keeping his name out of the papers as much as possible, came once more to the throne, and owned the city and all its inhabitants and all its business enterprises and all its public utilities, body and soul.

One night, shortly after the new officials went into power, there was no light in the twelve blocks over which the Brightlight Company had exclusive control, nor any light in the outside districts it supplied. This was the first time in years that the company, equipped with an emergency battery of dynamos which now proved out of order, had ever failed for an instant of proper service. Candles, kerosene lamps and old gas fixtures, the rusty cocks of which had not been turned in a decade, were put hastily in use, while the streets were black with a blackness particularly Stygian, contrasted with the brilliantly illuminated squares supplied by the Consolidated Company. All night long the mechanical force, attended by the worried but painfully helpless Bobby, pounded and tapped and worked in the grime, but it was not until broad daylight that they were able to discover the cause of trouble. For two nights the lights ran steadily. On the third night, at about seven-thirty, they turned to a dull, red glow, and slowly died out. This time it was wire trouble, and through the long night as large a force of men as could be mustered were tracing it. Not until noon of the next day was the leak found.

It was a full week before that section of the city was for the third time in darkness, but when this occurred the business men of the district, who had been patient enough the first night and enduring enough the second, loosed their reins and became frantic.

At this happy juncture the Consolidated Company threw an army of canvassers into those twelve monopolized blocks, and the canvassers did not need to be men who could talk, for arguments were not necessary. The old, worn-out equipment of the Brightlight Electric, and the fact that it was managed and controlled by men who knew nothing whatever of the business, its very president a young fellow who had probably never seen a dynamo until he took charge, were enough.

Bobby, passing over Plum Street one morning, was surprised to see a large gang of men putting in new poles, and when he reached the office he asked Johnson about it. In two minutes he had definitely ascertained that no orders had been issued by the Brightlight Electric Company nor any one connected with it, and further inquiry revealed the fact that these poles were being put up by the Consolidated. He called up Chalmers at once.