"But I have got me a son and I am going to keep him," she said aloud, putting her hand on Sam's arm.

Very serious and troubled, Sam went down the gravel path toward the road. He felt there was something cowardly in the part she had given him to play, but he could see no alternative.

"After all," he reflected, "it is sensible—it is a woman's battle."

Half way to the road he stopped and, running back, caught her in his arms and gave her a great hug.

"Good-bye, little Mother," he cried and kissed her upon the lips.

And she, watching him as he went again down the gravel path, was overcome with tenderness. She went to the back of the porch and leaning against the house put her head upon her arm. Then turning and smiling through her tears she called after him.

"Did you crack their heads hard, boy?" she asked.

* * * * *

From Mary's house Sam went to his own. On the gravel path an idea had come to him. He went into the house and, sitting down at the kitchen table with pen and ink, began writing. In the sleeping room back of the parlour he could hear Windy snoring. He wrote carefully, erasing and writing again. Then, drawing up a chair before the kitchen fire, he read over and over what he had written, and putting on his coat went through the dawn to the house of Tom Comstock, editor of the Caxton Argus, and roused him out of bed.

"I'll run it on the front page, Sam, and it won't cost you anything," Comstock promised. "But why run it? Let the matter drop."

"I shall just have time to pack and get the morning train for Chicago," Sam thought.

Early the evening before, Telfer, Wildman, and Freedom Smith, at Valmore's suggestion, had made a visit to Hunter's jewelry store. For an hour they bargained, selected, rejected, and swore at the jeweller. When the choice was made and the gift lay shining against white cotton in a box on the counter Telfer made a speech.

"I will talk straight to that boy," he declared, laughing. "I am not going to spend my time training his mind for money making and then have him fail me. I shall tell him that if he doesn't make money in that Chicago I shall come and take the watch from him."

Putting the gift into his pocket Telfer went out of the store and along the street to Eleanor's shop. He strutted through the display room and into the workshop where Eleanor sat with a hat on her knee.

"What am I going to do, Eleanor?" he demanded, standing with legs spread apart and frowning down upon her, "what am I going to do without Sam?"

A freckle-faced boy opened the shop door and threw a newspaper on the floor. The boy had a ringing voice and quick brown eyes. Telfer went again through the display room, touching with his cane the posts upon which hung the finished hats, and whistling. Standing before the shop, with the cane hooked upon his arm, he rolled a cigarette and watched the boy running from door to door along the street.

"I shall have to be adopting a new son," he said musingly.

After Sam left, Tom Comstock stood in his white nightgown and re-read the statement just given him. He read it over and over, and then, laying it on the kitchen table, filled and lighted a corncob pipe. A draft of wind blew into the room under the kitchen door chilling his thin shanks so that he drew his bare feet, one after the other, up behind the protective walls of his nightgown.

"On the night of my mother's death," ran the statement, "I sat in the kitchen of our house eating my supper when my father came in and began shouting and talking loudly, disturbing my mother who was asleep. I put my hand at his throat and squeezed until I thought he was dead, and carried him around the house and threw him into the road. Then I ran to the house of Mary Underwood, who was once my schoolteacher, and told her what I had done. She took me home, awoke John Telfer, and then went to look for the body of my father, who was not dead after all. John McPherson knows this is true, if he can be made to tell the truth."

Tom Comstock shouted to his wife, a small nervous woman with red cheeks, who set up type in the shop, did her own housework, and gathered most of the news and advertising for The Argus.

"Ain't that a slasher?" he asked, handing her the statement Sam had written.

"Well, it ought to stop the mean things they are saying about Mary Underwood," she snapped. Then, taking the glasses from her nose, and looking at Tom, who, while he did not find time to give her much help with The Argus, was the best checker player in Caxton and had once been to a state tournament of experts in that sport, she added, "Poor Jane McPherson, to have had a son like Sam and no better father for him than that liar Windy. Choked him, eh? Well, if the men of this town had any spunk they would finish the job."



BOOK II

CHAPTER I

For two years Sam lived the life of a travelling buyer, visiting towns in Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa, and making deals with men who, like Freedom Smith, bought the farmers' products. On Sundays he sat in chairs before country hotels and walked in the streets of strange towns, or, getting back to the city at the week end, went through the downtown streets and among the crowds in the parks with young men he had met on the road. From time to time he went to Caxton and sat for an hour with the men in Wildman's, stealing away later for an evening with Mary Underwood.

In the store he heard news of Windy, who was laying close siege to the farmer's widow he later married, and who seldom appeared in Caxton. In the store he saw the boy with freckles on his nose—the same John Telfer had watched running along Main Street on the night when he went to show Eleanor the gold watch bought for Sam and who sat now on the cracker barrel in the store and later went with Telfer to dodge the swinging cane and listen to the eloquence poured out on the night air. Telfer had not got the chance to stand with a crowd about him at the railroad station and make a parting speech to Sam, and in secret he resented the loss of that opportunity. After turning the matter over in his mind and thinking of many fine flourishes and ringing periods to give colour to the speech he had been compelled to send the gift by mail. And Sam, while the gift had touched him deeply and had brought back to his mind the essential solid goodness of the town amid the cornfields, so that he lost much of the bitterness aroused by the attack upon Mary Underwood, had been able to make but a tame and halting reply to the four. In his room in Chicago he had spent an evening writing and rewriting, putting in and taking out flourishes, and had ended by sending a brief line of thanks.

Valmore, whose affection for the boy had been a slow growth and who, now that he was gone, missed him more than the others, once spoke to Freedom Smith of the change that had come over young McPherson. Freedom sat in the wide old phaeton in the road before Valmore's shop as the blacksmith walked around the grey mare, lifting her feet and looking at the shoes.

"What has happened to Sam—he has changed so much?" he asked, dropping a foot of the mare and coming to lean upon the front wheel. "Already the city has changed him," he added regretfully.

Freedom took a match from his pocket and lighted the short black pipe.

"He bites off his words," continued Valmore; "he sits for an hour in the store and then goes away, and doesn't come back to say good-bye when he leaves town. What has got into him?"

Freedom gathered up the reins and spat over the dashboard into the dust of the road. A dog idling in the street jumped as though a stone had been hurled at him.

"If you had something he wanted to buy you would find he talked all right," he exploded. "He skins me out of my eyeteeth every time he comes to town and then gives me a cigar wrapped in tinfoil to make me like it."

* * * * *

For some months after his hurried departure from Caxton the changing, hurrying life of the city profoundly interested the tall strong boy from the Iowa village, who had the cold, quick business stroke of the money- maker combined with an unusually active interest in the problems of life and of living. Instinctively he looked upon business as a great game in which many men sat, and in which the capable, quiet ones waited patiently until a certain moment and then pounced upon what they would possess. With the quickness and accuracy of a beast at the kill they pounced and Sam felt that he had that stroke, and in his deals with country buyers used it ruthlessly. He knew the vague, uncertain look that came into the eyes of unsuccessful business men at critical moments and watched for it and took advantage of it as a successful prize fighter watches for a similar vague, uncertain look in the eyes of an opponent.

He had found his work, and had the assurance and the confidence that comes with that discovery. The stroke that he saw in the hand of the successful business men about him is the stroke also of the master painter, scientist, actor, singer, prize fighter. It was the hand of Whistler, Balzac, Agassiz, and Terry McGovern. The sense of it had been in him when as a boy he watched the totals grow in the yellow bankbook, and now and then he recognised it in Telfer talking on a country road. In the city where men of wealth and power in affairs rubbed elbows with him in the street cars and walked past him in hotel lobbies he watched and waited saying to himself, "I also will be such a one."

Sam had not lost the vision that had come to him when as a boy he walked on the road and listened to the talk of Telfer, but he now thought of himself as one who had not only a hunger for achievement but also a knowledge of where to look for it. At times he had stirring dreams of vast work to be done by his hand that made the blood race in him, but for the most part he went his way quietly, making friends, looking about him, keeping his mind busy with his own thoughts, making deals.

During his first year in the city he lived in the house of an ex-Caxton family named Pergrin that had been in Chicago for several years, but that still continued to send its members, one at a time, to spend summer vacations in the Iowa village. To these people he carried letters handed him during the month after his mother's death, and letters regarding him had come to them from Caxton. In the house, where eight people sat down to dinner, only three besides himself were Caxton-bred, but thoughts and talk of the town pervaded the house and crept into every conversation.

"I was thinking of old John Moore to-day—does he still drive that team of black ponies?" the housekeeping sister, a mild-looking woman of thirty, would ask of Sam at the dinner table, breaking in on a conversation of baseball, or a tale by one of the boarders of a new office building to be erected in the Loop.

"No, he don't," Jake Pergrin, a fat bachelor of forty who was foreman in a machine shop and the man of the house, would answer. So long had Jake been the final authority in the house on affairs touching Caxton that he looked upon Sam as an intruder. "John told me last summer when I was home that he intended to sell the blacks and buy mules," he would add, looking at the youth challengingly.

The Pergrin family was in fact upon foreign soil. Living amid the roar and bustle of Chicago's vast west side, it still turned with hungry heart toward the place of corn and of steers, and wished that work for Jake, its mainstay, could be found in that paradise.

Jake Pergrin, a bald-headed man with a paunch, stubby iron-grey moustache, and a dark line of machine oil encircling his finger nails so that they stood forth separately like formal flower beds at the edge of a lawn, worked industriously from Monday morning until Saturday night, going to bed at nine o'clock, and until that hour wandering, whistling, from room to room through the house, in a pair of worn carpet slippers, or sitting in his room practising on a violin. On Saturday evening, the habits formed in his Caxton days being strong in him, he came home with his pay in his pocket, settled with the two sisters for the week's living, sat down to dinner neatly shaved and combed, and then disappeared upon the troubled waters of the town. Late on Sunday evening he re-appeared, with empty pockets, unsteady step, blood-shot eyes, and a noisy attempt at self- possessed unconcern, to hurry upstairs and crawl into bed in preparation for another week of toil and respectability. The man had a certain Rabelaisian sense of humour and kept score of the new ladies met on his weekly flights by pencil marks upon his bedroom wall. He once took Sam upstairs to show his record. A row of them ran half around the room.

Besides the bachelor there was a sister, a tall gaunt woman of thirty-five who taught school, and the housekeeper, thirty, mild, and blessed with a remarkably sweet speaking voice. Then there was a medical student in the front room, Sam in an alcove off the hall, a grey-haired woman stenographer, whom Jake called Marie Antoinette, and a buyer from a wholesale dry-goods house, with a vivacious, fun-loving little Southern wife.

The women in the Pergrin house seemed to Sam tremendously concerned about their health and each evening talked of the matter, he thought, more than his mother had talked during her illness. While Sam lived with them they were all under the influence of a strange sort of faith healer and took what they called "Health Suggestion" treatments. Twice each week the faith healer came to the house, laid his hands upon their backs and took their money. The treatment afforded Jake a never-ending source of amusement and in the evening he went through the house putting his hands upon the backs of the women and demanding money from them, but the dry-goods buyer's wife, who for years had coughed at night, slept peacefully after some weeks of the treatment and the cough did not return while Sam remained in the house.

In the house Sam had a standing. Glowing tales of his shrewdness in business, his untiring industry, and the size of his bank account, had preceded him from Caxton, and these tales the Pergrins, in their loyalty to the town and to all the products of the town, did not allow to shrink in the re-telling. The housekeeping sister, a kindly woman, became fond of Sam, and in his absence would boast of him to chance callers or to the boarders gathered in the living room in the evening. She it was who laid the foundation of the medical student's belief that Sam was a kind of genius in money matters, a belief that enabled him later to make a successful assault upon a legacy which came to that young man.

Frank Eckardt, the medical student, Sam took as a friend. On Sunday afternoons they went to walk in the streets, or, taking two girl friends of Frank's, who were also students at the medical school, on their arms, they went to the park and sat upon benches under the trees.

For one of these young women Sam conceived a regard that approached tenderness. Sunday after Sunday he spent with her, and once, walking through the park on an evening in the late fall, the dry brown leaves rustling under their feet and the sun going down in red splendour before their eyes, he took her hand and walked in silence, feeling tremendously alive and vital as he had felt on that other night walking under the trees of Caxton with the dark-skinned daughter of banker Walker.

That nothing came of the affair and that after a time he did not see the girl again was due, he thought, to his own growing interest in money making and to the fact that there was in her, as in Frank Eckardt, a blind devotion to something that he could not himself understand.

Once he had a talk with Eckardt of the matter. "She is fine and purposeful like a woman I knew in my home town," he said, thinking of Eleanor Telfer, "but she will not talk to me of her work as sometimes she talks to you. I want her to talk. There is something about her that I do not understand and that I want to understand. I think that she likes me and once or twice I have thought she would not greatly mind my making love to her, but I do not understand her just the same."

One day in the office of the company for which he worked Sam became acquainted with a young advertising man named Jack Prince, a brisk, very much alive young fellow who made money rapidly, spent it lavishly, and had friends and acquaintances in every office, every hotel lobby, every bar room and restaurant in the down-town section of the city. The chance acquaintance rapidly grew into friendship. The clever, witty Prince made a kind of hero of Sam, admiring his reserve and good sense and boasting of him far and wide through the town. With Prince, Sam occasionally went on mild carouses, and, once, in the midst of thousands of people sitting about tables and drinking beer at the Coliseum on Wabash Avenue, he and Prince got into a fight with two waiters, Prince declaring he had been cheated and Sam, although he thought his friend in the wrong, striking out with his fist and dragging Prince through the door and into a passing street car in time to avoid a rush of other waiters hurrying to the aid of the one who lay dazed and sputtering on the sawdust floor.

After these evenings of carousal, carried on with Jack Prince and with young men met on trains and about country hotels, Sam spent hour after hour walking about town absorbed in his own thoughts and getting his own impressions of what he saw. In the affairs with the young men he played, for the most part, a passive role, going with them from place to place and drinking until they became loud and boisterous, or morose and quarrelsome, and then slipping away to his own room, amused or irritated as the circumstances, or the temperament of his companions, had made or marred the joviality of the evening. On his nights alone, he put his hands into his pockets and walked for endless miles through the lighted streets, getting in a dim way a realisation of the hugeness of life. All of the faces going past him, the women in their furs, the young men with cigars in their mouths going to the theatres, the bald old men with watery eyes, the boys with bundles of newspapers under their arms, and the slim prostitutes lurking in the hallways, should have interested him deeply. In his youth, and with the pride of sleeping power in him, he saw them only as so many individuals that might some day test their ability against his own. And if he peered at them closely and marked down face after face in the crowds it was as a sitter in the great game of business that he looked, exercising his mind by imagining this or that one arrayed against him in deals, and planning the method by which he would win in the imaginary struggle.

There was at that time in Chicago a place, to be reached by a bridge above the Illinois Central Railroad track, that Sam sometimes visited on stormy nights to watch the lake lashed by the wind. Great masses of water moving swiftly and silently broke with a roar against wooden piles, backed by hills of stone and earth, and the spray from the broken waves fell upon Sam's face and on winter nights froze on his coat. He had learned to smoke, and leaning upon the railing of the bridge would stand for hours with a pipe in his mouth looking at the moving water, filled with awe and admiration of the silent power of it.

One night in September, when he was walking alone in the streets, an incident happened that showed him also a silent power within himself, a power that startled and for the moment frightened him. Walking into a little street back of Dearborn, he was suddenly aware of the faces of women looking out at him through small square windows cut in the fronts of the houses. Here and there, before and behind him, were the faces; voices called, smiles invited, hands beckoned. Up and down the street went men looking at the sidewalk, their coats turned up about their necks, their hats pulled down over their eyes. They looked at the faces of the women pressed against the little squares of glass and then, turning, suddenly, sprang in at the doors of the houses as if pursued. Among the walkers on the sidewalk were old men, men in shabby coats whose feet scuffled as they hurried along, and young boys with the pink of virtue in their cheeks. In the air was lust, heavy and hideous. It got into Sam's brain and he stood hesitating and uncertain, startled, nerveless, afraid. He remembered a story he had once heard from John Telfer, a story of the disease and death that lurks in the little side streets of cities, and ran into Van Buren Street and from that into lighted State. He climbed up the stairway of the elevated railroad and jumping on the first train went away south to walk for hours on a gravel roadway at the edge of the lake in Jackson Park. The wind from the lake and the laughter and talk of people passing under the lights cooled the fever in him, as once it had been cooled by the eloquence of John Telfer, walking on the road near Caxton, and with his voice marshalling the armies of the standing corn.

Into Sam's mind came a picture of the cold, silent water moving in great masses under the night sky and he thought that in the world of men there was a force as resistless, as little understood, as little talked of, moving always forward, silent, powerful—the force of sex. He wondered how the force would be broken in his own case, against what breakwater it would spend itself. At midnight, he went home across the city and crept into his alcove in the Pergrin house, puzzled and for the time utterly tired. In his bed, he turned his face to the wall and resolutely closing his eyes tried to sleep. "There are things not to be understood," he told himself. "To live decently is a matter of good sense. I will keep thinking of what I want to do and not go into such a place again."

One day, when he had been in Chicago two years, there happened an incident of another sort, an incident so grotesque, so Pan-like, so full of youth, that for days after it happened he thought of it with delight, and walked in the streets or sat in a passenger train laughing joyfully at the remembrance of some new detail of the affair.

Sam, who was the son of Windy McPherson and who had more than once ruthlessly condemned all men who put liquor into their mouths, got drunk, and for eighteen hours went shouting poetry, singing songs, and yelling at the stars like a wood god on the bend.

Late on an afternoon in the early spring he sat with Jack Prince in DeJonge's restaurant in Monroe Street. Prince, his watch lying before him on the table and the thin stem of a wine glass between his fingers, talked to Sam of the man for whom they had been waiting a half hour.

"He will be late, of course," he exclaimed, refilling Sam's glass. "The man was never on time in his life. To keep an appointment promptly would take something from him. It would be like the bloom of youth gone from the cheeks of a maiden."

Sam had already seen the man for whom they waited. He was thirty-five, small and narrow-shouldered, with a little wrinkled face, a huge nose, and a pair of eyeglasses that hooked over his ears. Sam had seen him in a Michigan Avenue club with Prince solemnly pitching silver dollars at a chalk mark on the floor with a group of serious, solid-looking old men.

"They are the crowd that have just put through the big deal in Kansas oil stock and the little one is Morris, who handled the publicity for them," Prince had explained.

Later, when they were walking down Michigan Avenue, Prince talked at length of Morris, whom he admired immensely. "He is the best advertising and publicity man in America," he declared. "He isn't a four-flusher, as I am, and does not make as much money, but he can take another man's ideas and express them so simply and forcibly that they tell the man's story better than he knew it himself. And that's all there is to advertising."

He began laughing.

"It is funny to think of it. Tom Morris will do a job of work and the man for whom he does it will swear that he did it himself, that every pat phrase on the printed page Tom has turned out, is one of his own. He will howl like a beast at paying Tom's bill, and then the next time he will try to do the job himself and make a hopeless muddle of it so that he has to send for Tom only to see the trick done over again like shelling corn off the cob. The best men in Chicago send for him."

Into the restaurant came Tom Morris bearing under his arm a huge pasteboard portfolio. He seemed hurried and nervous. "I am on my way to the office of the International Biscuit Turning Machine Company," he explained to Prince. "I can't stop at all. I have here the layout of a circular designed to push on to the market some more of that common stock of theirs that hasn't paid a dividend for ten years."

Thrusting out his hand, Prince dragged Morris into a chair. "Never mind the Biscuit Machine people and their stock," he commanded; "they will always have common stock to sell. It is inexhaustible. I want you to meet McPherson here who will some day have something big for you to help him with."

Morris reached across the table and took Sam's hand; his own was small and soft like that of a woman. "I am worked to death," he complained; "I have my eye on a chicken farm in Indiana. I am going down there to live."

For an hour the three men sat in the restaurant while Prince talked of a place in Wisconsin where the fish should be biting. "A man has told me of the place twenty times," he declared; "I am sure I could find it on a railroad folder. I have never been fishing nor have you, and Sam here comes from a place to which they carry water in wagons over the plains."

The little man who had been drinking copiously of the wine looked from Prince to Sam. From time to time he took off his glasses and wiped them with a handkerchief. "I don't understand your being in such society," he announced; "you have the solid, substantial look of a bucket-shop man. Prince here will get nowhere. He is honest, sells wind and his charming society, and spends the money that he gets, instead of marrying and putting it in his wife's name."

Prince arose. "It is useless to waste time in persiflage," he began and then turning to Sam, "There is a place in Wisconsin," he said uncertainly.

Morris picked up the portfolio and with a grotesque effort at steadiness started for the door followed by Prince and Sam walking with wavering steps. In the street Prince took the portfolio out of the little man's hand. "Let your mother carry it, Tommy," he said, shaking his finger under Morris's nose. He began singing a lullaby. "When the bough bends the cradle will fall."

The three men walked out of Monroe and into State Street, Sam's head feeling strangely light. The buildings along the street reeled against the sky. A sudden fierce longing for wild adventure seized him. On a corner Morris stopped, took the handkerchief from his pocket and again wiped his glasses. "I want to be sure that I see clearly," he said; "it seems to me that in the bottom of that last glass of wine I saw three of us in a cab with a basket of life oil on the seat between us going to the station to catch the train for that place Jack's friend told fish lies about."

The next eighteen hours opened up a new world to Sam. With the fumes of liquor rising in his brain, he rode for two hours on a train, tramped in the darkness along dusty roads and, building a bonfire in a woods, danced in the light of it upon the grass, holding the hands of Prince and the little man with the wrinkled face. Solemnly he stood upon a stump at the edge of a wheatfield and recited Poe's "Helen," taking on the voice, the gestures and even the habit of spreading his legs apart, of John Telfer. And then overdoing the last, he sat down suddenly on the stump, and Morris, coming forward with a bottle in his hand said, "Fill the lamp, man—the light of reason has gone out."

From the bonfire in the woods and Sam's recital from the stump, the three friends emerged again upon the road, and a belated farmer driving home half asleep on the seat of his wagon caught their attention. With the skill of an Indian boy the diminutive Morris sprang upon the wagon and thrust a ten dollar bill into the farmer's hand. "Lead us, O man of the soil!" he shouted, "Lead us to a gilded palace of sin! Take us to a saloon! The life oil gets low in the can!"

Beyond the long, jolting ride in the wagon Sam never became quite clear. In his mind ran vague notions of a wild carousal in a country tavern, of himself acting as bartender, and a huge red-faced woman rushing here and there under the direction of a tiny man, dragging reluctant rustics to the bar and commanding them to keep on drinking the beer that Sam drew until the last of the ten dollars given to the man of the wagon should have gone into her cash drawer. Also, he thought that Jack Prince had put a chair upon the bar and that he sat on it explaining to the hurrying drawer of beer that although the Egyptian kings had built great pyramids to celebrate themselves they never built anything more gigantic than the jag Tom Morris was building among the farm hands in the room.

Later Sam thought that he and Jack Prince tried to sleep under a pile of grain sacks in a shed and that Morris came to them weeping because every one in the world was asleep and most of them lying under tables.

And then, his head clearing, Sam found himself with the two others walking again upon the dusty road in the dawn and singing songs.

On the train, with the help of a Negro porter, the three men tried to efface the dust and the stains of the wild night. The pasteboard portfolio containing the circular for the Biscuit Machine Company was still under Jack Prince's arm and the little man, wiping and re-wiping his glasses, peered at Sam.

"Did you come with us or are you a child we have adopted here in these parts?" he asked.



CHAPTER II

It was a wonderful place, that South Water Street in Chicago where Sam came to make his business start in the city, and it was proof of the dry unresponsiveness in him that he did not sense more fully its meaning and its message. All day the food stuff of a vast city flowed through the narrow streets. Blue-shirted, broad-shouldered teamsters from the tops of high piled wagons bawled at scurrying pedestrians. On the sidewalks in boxes, bags, and barrels, lay oranges from Florida and California, figs from Arabia, bananas from Jamaica, nuts from the hills of Spain and the plains of Africa, cabbages from Ohio, beans from Michigan, corn and potatoes from Iowa. In December, fur-coated men hurried through the forests of northern Michigan gathering Christmas trees that found their way to warm firesides through the street. And summer and winter a million hens laid the eggs that were gathered there, and the cattle on a thousand hills sent their yellow butter fat packed in tubs and piled upon trucks to add to the confusion.

Into this street Sam walked, thinking little of the wonder of these things and thinking haltingly, getting his sense of the bigness of it in dollars and cents. Standing in the doorway of the commission house for which he was to work, strong, well clad, able and efficient, he looked through the streets, seeing and hearing the hurry and the roar and the shouting of voices, and then with a smile upon his lips went inside. In his brain was an unexpressed thought. As the old Norse marauders looked at the cities sitting in their splendour on the Mediterranean so looked he. "What loot!" a voice within him said, and his brain began devising methods by which he should get his share of it.

Years later, when Sam was a man of big affairs, he drove one day in a carriage through the streets and turning to his companion, a grey-haired, dignified Boston man who sat beside him, said, "I worked here once and used to sit on a barrel of apples at the edge of the sidewalk thinking how clever I was to make more money in one month than the man who raised the apples made in a year."

The Boston man, stirred by the sight of so much foodstuff and moved to epigram by his mood, looked up and down the street.

"The foodstuff of an empire rattling o'er the stones," he said.

"I should have made more money here," answered Sam dryly.

The commission firm for which Sam worked was a partnership, not a corporation, and was owned by two brothers. Of the two Sam thought that the elder, a tall, bald, narrow-shouldered man, with a long narrow face and a suave manner, was the real master, and represented most of the ability in the partnership. He was oily, silent, tireless. All day he went in and out of the office and warehouses and up and down the crowded street, sucking nervously at an unlighted cigar. He was a great worker in a suburban church, but a shrewd and, Sam suspected, an unscrupulous business man. Occasionally the minister or some of the women of the suburban church came into the office to talk with him, and Sam was amused at the thought that Narrow Face, when he talked of the affairs of the church, bore a striking resemblance to the brown-bearded minister of the church in Caxton.

The other brother was a far different sort, and, in business, Sam thought, a much inferior man. He was a heavy, broad-shouldered, square-faced man of about thirty, who sat in the office dictating letters and who stayed out two or three hours to lunch. He sent out letters signed by him on the firm's stationery with the title of General Manager, and Narrow Face let him do it. Broad Shoulders had been educated in New England and even after several years away from his college seemed more interested in it than in the welfare of the business. For a month or more in the spring he took most of the time of one of the two stenographers employed by the firm writing letters to graduates of Chicago high schools to induce them to go East to finish their education; and when a graduate of the college came to Chicago seeking employment, he closed his desk and spent entire days going from place to place, introducing, urging, recommending. Sam noticed, however, that when the firm employed a new man in their own office or on the road it was Narrow-Face who chose the man.

Broad-shoulders had been a famous football player in his day and wore an iron brace on his leg. The offices, like most of the offices on the street, were dark and narrow, and smelled of decaying vegetables and rancid butter. Noisy Greek and Italian hucksters wrangled on the sidewalk in front, and among these went Narrow-Face hurrying about making deals.

In South Water Street Sam did well, multiplying his thirty-six hundred dollars by ten during the three years that he stayed there, or went out from there to towns and cities directing a part of the great flowing river of foodstuff through his firm's front door.

With almost his first day on the street he began seeing on all sides of him opportunity for gain, and set himself industriously at work to get his hand upon money with which to take advantage of the chances that he thought lay so invitingly about. Within a year he had made much progress. From a woman on Wabash Avenue he got six thousand dollars, and he planned and executed a coup that gave him the use of twenty thousand dollars that had come as a legacy to his friend, the medical student, who lived at the Pergrin house.

Sam had eggs and apples lying in warehouse against a rise; game, smuggled across the state line from Michigan and Wisconsin, lay frozen in cold storage tagged with his name and ready to be sold at a long profit to hotels and fashionable restaurants; and there were even secret bushels of corn and wheat lying in other warehouses along the Chicago River ready to be thrown on the market at a word from him, or, the margins by which he kept his hold on the stuff not being forthcoming, at a word from a LaSalle Street broker.

Getting the twenty thousand dollars out of the hands of the medical student was a turning point in Sam's life. Sunday after Sunday he walked with Eckardt in the streets or loitered with him in the parks thinking of the money lying idle in the bank and of the deals he might be turning with it in the street or on the road. Daily he saw more clearly the power of cash. Other commission merchants along South Water Street came running into the office of his firm with tense, anxious faces asking Narrow-Face to help them over rough spots in the day's trading. Broad-Shoulders, who had no business ability but who had married a rich woman, went on month after month taking half the profits brought in by the ability of his tall, shrewd brother, and Narrow-Face, who had taken a liking for Sam and who occasionally stopped for a word with him, spoke of the matter often and eloquently.

"Spend your time with no one who hasn't money to help you," he said; "on the road look for the men with money and then try to get it. That's all there is to business—money-getting." And then looking across to the desk of his brother he would add, "I would kick half the men in business out of it if I could, but I myself must dance to the tune that money plays."

One day Sam went to the office of an attorney named Webster, whose reputation for the shrewd drawing of contracts had come to him from Narrow-Face.

"I want a contract drawn that will give me absolute control of twenty thousand dollars with no risk on my part if I lose the money and no promise to pay more than seven per cent if I do not lose," he said.

The attorney, a slender, middle-aged man with a swarthy skin and black hair, put his hands on the desk before him and looked at the tall young man.

"What collateral?" he asked.

Sam shook his head. "Can you draw such a contract that will be legal and what will it cost me?" he asked.

The lawyer laughed good naturedly. "I can draw it of course. Why not?"

Sam, taking a roll of bills from his pocket, counted the amount upon the table.

"Who are you anyway?" asked Webster. "If you can get twenty thousand and without collateral you're worth knowing. I might be getting up a gang to rob a mail train."

Sam did not answer. He put the contract in his pocket and went home to his alcove at the Pergrins. He wanted to get by himself and think. He did not believe that he would by any chance lose Frank Eckardt's money, but he knew that Eckardt himself would draw back from the kind of deals that he expected to make with the money, that they would frighten and alarm him, and he wondered if he was being honest.

In his own room after dinner Sam studied carefully the agreement drawn by Webster. It seemed to him to cover what he wanted covered, and having got it well fixed in his mind he tore it up. "There is no use his knowing I have been to a lawyer," he thought guiltily.

Getting into bed, he began building plans for the future. With more than thirty thousand dollars at his command he thought that he should be able to make headway rapidly. "In my hands it will double itself every year," he told himself and getting out of bed he drew a chair to the window and sat down, feeling strangely alive and awake like a young man in love. He saw himself going on and on, directing, managing, ruling men. It seemed to him that there was nothing he could not do. "I will run factories and banks and maybe mines and railroads," he thought and his mind leaped forward so that he saw himself, grey, stern, and capable, sitting at a broad desk high in a great stone building, a materialisation of John Telfer's word picture—"You will be a big man of dollars—it is plain."

And then into Sam's mind came another picture. He remembered a Saturday afternoon when a young man had come running into the office on South Water Street, a young man who owed Narrow-Face a sum of money and could not pay it. He remembered the unpleasant tightening of the mouth and the sudden shrewd hard look in his employer's long narrow face. He had not heard much of the talk, but he was aware of a strained pleading quality in the voice of the young man who had said over and over slowly and painfully, "But, man, my honour is at stake," and of a coldness in the answering voice replying persistently, "With me it is not a matter of honour but of dollars, and I am going to get them."

From the alcove window Sam looked out upon a vacant lot covered with patches of melting snow. Beyond the lot facing him stood a flat building, and the snow, melting on the roof, made a little stream that ran down some hidden pipe and rattled out upon the ground. The noise of the falling water and the sound of distant footsteps going homeward through the sleeping city brought back thoughts of other nights when as a boy in Caxton he had sat thus, thinking disconnected thoughts.

Without knowing it Sam was fighting one of the real battles of his life, a battle in which the odds were very much against the quality in him that got him out of bed to look at the snow-clad vacant lot.

There was in the youth much of the brute trader, blindly intent upon gain; much of the quality that has given America so many of its so-called great men. It was the quality that had sent him in secret to Lawyer Webster to protect himself without protecting the simple credulous young medical student, and that had made him say as he came home with the contract in his pocket, "I will do what I can," when in truth he meant, "I will get what I can."

There may be business men in America who do not get what they can, who simply love power. One sees men here and there in banks, at the heads of great industrial trusts, in factories and in great mercantile houses of whom one would like to think thus. They are the men who one dreams have had an awakening, who have found themselves; they are the men hopeful thinkers try to recall again and again to the mind.

To these men America is looking. It is asking them to keep the faith, to stand themselves up against the force of the brute trader, the dollar man, the man who with his one cunning wolf quality of acquisitiveness has too long ruled the business of the nation.

I have said that the sense of equity in Sam fought an unequal battle. He was in business, and young in business, in a day when all America was seized with a blind grappling for gain. The nation was drunk with it, trusts were being formed, mines opened; from the ground spurted oil and gas; railroads creeping westward opened yearly vast empires of new land. To be poor was to be a fool; thought waited, art waited; and men at their firesides gathered their children around them and talked glowingly of men of dollars, holding them up as prophets fit to lead the youth of the young nation.

Sam had in him the making of the new, the commanding man of business. It was that quality in him that made him sit by the window thinking before going to the medical student with the unfair contract, and the same quality had sent him forth night after night to walk alone in the streets when other young men went to theatres or to walk with girls in the park. He had, in truth, a taste for the lonely hours when thought grows. He was a step beyond the youth who hurries to the theatre or buries himself in stories of love or adventure. He had in him something that wanted a chance.

In the flat building across the vacant lot a light appeared at a window and through the lighted window he saw a man clad in pajamas who propped a sheet of music against a dressing-table and who had a shining silver horn in his hand. Sam watched, filled with mild curiosity. The man, not reckoning on an onlooker at so late an hour, began an elaborate and amusing schedule of personation. He opened the window, put the horn to his lips and then turning bowed before the lighted room as before an audience. He put his hand to his lips and blew kisses about, then put the horn to his lips and looked again at the sheet of music.

The note that came out of the window on the still air was a failure, it flattened into a squawk. Sam laughed and pulled down the window. The incident had brought back to his mind another man who bowed to a crowd and blew upon a horn. Getting into bed he pulled the covers about him and went to sleep. "I will get Frank's money if I can," he told himself, settling the matter that had been in his mind. "Most men are fools and if I do not get his money some other man will."

On the next afternoon Eckardt had lunch down town with Sam. Together they went to a bank where Sam showed the profits of deals he had made and the growth of his bank account, going afterward into South Water Street where Sam talked glowingly of the money to be made by a shrewd man who knew the ways of the street and had a head upon his shoulders.

"That's just it," said Frank Eckardt, falling quickly into the trap Sam had set, and hungering for profits; "I have money but no head on my shoulders for using it. I wish you would take it and see what you can do."

With a thumping heart Sam went home across the city to the Pergrin house, Eckardt beside him in the elevated train. In Sam's room the agreement was written out by Sam and signed by Eckardt. At dinner time they had the drygoods buyer in to sign as witness.

And the agreement turned out to Eckardt's advantage. In no year did Sam return him less than ten per cent, and in the end gave back the principal more than doubled so that Eckardt was able to retire from the practice of medicine and live upon the interest of his capital in a village near Tiffin, Ohio.

With the thirty thousand dollars in his hands Sam began to reach out and extend the scope of his ventures. He bought and sold constantly, not only eggs, butter, apples, and grain, but also houses and building lots. Through his head marched long rows of figures. Deals worked themselves out in detail in his brain as he went about town drinking with young men, or sat at dinner in the Pergrin house. He even began working over in his head various schemes for getting into the firm by which he was employed, and thought that he might work upon Broad-Shoulders, getting hold of his interest and forcing himself into control. And then, the fear of Narrow- Face holding him back and his growing success in deals keeping his mind occupied, he was suddenly confronted by an opportunity that changed entirely the plans he was making for himself.

Through Jack Prince's suggestion Colonel Tom Rainey of the great Rainey Arms Company sent for him and offered him a position as buyer of all the materials used in their factories.

It was the kind of connection Sam had unconsciously been seeking—a company, strong, old, conservative, known throughout the world. There was, in the talk with Colonel Tom, a hint of future opportunities to get stock in the company and perhaps to become eventually an official—these things were of course remote—to be dreamed of and worked toward—the company made it a part of its policy.

Sam said nothing, but already he had decided to accept the place, and was thinking of a profitable arrangement touching percentages on the amount saved in buying that had worked out so well for him during his years with Freedom Smith.

Sam's work for the firearms company took him off the road and confined him to an office all day long. In a way he regretted this. The complaints he had heard among travelling men in country hotels with regard to the hardship of travel meant nothing to his mind. Any kind of travel was a keen pleasure to him. Against the hardships and discomforts he balanced the tremendous advantages of seeing new places and faces and getting a look into many lives, and he looked back with a kind of retrospective joy on the three years of hurrying from place to place, catching trains, and talking with chance acquaintances met by the way. Also, the years on the road had given him many opportunities for secret and profitable deals of his own.

Over against these advantages the place at Rainey's threw him into close and continuous association with men of big affairs. The offices of the Arms Company occupied an entire floor of one of Chicago's newest and biggest skyscrapers and millionaire stockholders and men high in the service of the state and of the government at Washington came in and went out at the door. Sam looked at them closely. He wanted to have a tilt with them and try if his Caxton and South Water Street shrewdness would keep the head upon his shoulders in LaSalle Street. The opportunity seemed to him a big one and he went about his work quietly and ably, intent upon making the most of it.

The Rainey Arms Company, at the time of Sam's coming with it, was still largely owned by the Rainey family, father and daughter. Colonel Rainey, a grey-whiskered military looking man with a paunch, was the president and largest individual stockholder. He was a pompous, swaggering old fellow with a habit of making the most trivial statement with the air of a judge pronouncing the death sentence, and sat dutifully at his desk day after day looking very important and thoughtful, smoking long black cigars and signing personally piles of letters brought him by the heads of various departments. He looked upon himself as a silent but very important spoke in the government at Washington and every day issued many orders which the men at the heads of departments received with respect and disregarded in secret. Twice he had been prominently mentioned in connection with cabinet positions in the national government, and in talks with his cronies at clubs and restaurants he gave the impression of having actually refused an offer of appointment on both occasions.

Having got himself established as a factor in the management of the business, Sam found many things that surprised him. In every company of which he knew there was some one man to whom all looked for guidance, who at critical moments became dominant, saying "Do this, or that," and making no explanations. In the Rainey Company he found no such man, but, instead, a dozen strong departments, each with its own head and each more or less independent of the others.

Sam lay in his bed at night and went about in the evening thinking of this and of its meaning. Among the department heads there was a great deal of loyalty and devotion to Colonel Tom, and he thought that among them were a few men who were devoted to other interests than their own.

At the same time he told himself there was something wrong. He himself had no such feeling of loyalty and although he was willing to give lip service to the resounding talk of the colonel about the fine old traditions of the company, he could not bring himself to a belief in the idea of conducting a vast business on a system founded upon lip service to traditions, or upon loyalty to an individual.

"There must be loose ends lying about everywhere," he thought and followed the thought with another. "A man will come along, pick up these loose ends, and run the whole shop. Why not I?"

The Rainey Arms Company had made its millions for the Rainey and Whittaker families during the Civil War. Whittaker had been an inventor, making one of the first practical breech-loading guns, and the original Rainey had been a dry-goods merchant in an Illinois town who backed the inventor.

It proved itself a rare combination. Whittaker developed into a wonderful shop manager for his day, and, from the first, stayed at home building rifles and making improvements, enlarging the plant, getting out the goods. The drygoods merchant scurried about the country, going to Washington and to the capitals of the individual states, pulling wires, appealing to patriotism and state pride, taking big orders at fat prices.

In Chicago there is a tradition that more than once he went south of the Dixie line and that following these trips thousands of Rainey-Whittaker rifles found their way into the hands of Confederate soldiers, but this story which increased Sam's respect for the energetic little drygoods merchant, Colonel Tom, his son, indignantly denied. In reality Colonel Tom would have liked to think of the first Rainey as a huge, Jove-like god of arms. Like Windy McPherson of Caxton, given a chance, he would have invented a new ancestor.

After the Civil War, and Colonel Tom's growing to manhood, the Rainey and Whittaker fortunes were merged into one through the marriage of Jane Whittaker, the last of her line, to the only surviving Rainey, and upon her death her fortune, grown to more than a million, stood in the name of Sue Rainey, twenty-six, the only issue of the marriage.

From the first day, Sam began to forge ahead in the Rainey Company. In the buying end he found a rich field for spectacular money saving and money making and made the most of it. The position as buyer had for ten years been occupied by a distant cousin to Colonel Tom, now dead. Whether the cousin was a fool or a knave Sam could never quite decide and did not greatly care, but after he had got the situation in hand he felt that the man must have cost the company a tremendous sum, which he intended to save.

Sam's arrangement with the company gave him, besides a fair salary, half he saved in the fixed prices of standard materials. These prices had stood fixed for years and Sam went into them, cutting right and left, and making for himself during his first year twenty-three thousand dollars. At the end of the year, when the directors asked to have an adjustment made and the percentage contract annulled, he got a generous slice of company stock, the respect of Colonel Tom Rainey and the directors, the fear of some of the department heads, the loyal devotion of others, and the title of Treasurer of the company.

The Rainey Arms Company was in truth living largely upon the reputation built up for it by the first pushing energetic Rainey, and the inventive genius of his partner, Whittaker. Under Colonel Tom it had found new conditions and new competition which he had ignored, or met in a half- hearted way, standing on its reputation, its financial strength, and on the glory of its past achievements. Dry rot ate at its heart. The damage done was not great, but was growing greater. The heads of the departments, in whose hands so much of the running of the business lay, were many of them incompetent men with nothing to commend them but long years of service. And in the treasurer's office sat a quiet young man, barely turned twenty, who had no friends, wanted his own way, and who shook his head over the office traditions and was proud of his unbelief.

Seeing the absolute necessity of working through Colonel Tom, and having a head filled with ideas of things he wanted done, Sam began working to get suggestions into the older man's mind. Within a month after his elevation the two men were lunching together daily and Sam was spending many extra hours behind closed doors in Colonel Tom's office.

Although American business and manufacturing had not yet achieved the modern idea of efficiency in shop and office management, Sam had many of these ideas in his mind and expounded them tirelessly to Colonel Tom. He hated waste; he cared nothing for company tradition; he had no idea, as did the heads of other departments, of getting into a comfortable berth and spending the rest of his days there, and he was bent on managing the great Rainey Company, if not directly, then through Colonel Tom, who, he felt, was putty in his hands.

From his new position as treasurer Sam did not drop his work as buyer, but, after a talk with Colonel Tom, merged the two departments, put in capable assistants of his own, and went on with his work of effacing the tracks of the cousin. For years the company had been overpaying for inferior material. Sam put his own material inspectors into the west side factories and brought several big Pennsylvania steel companies scurrying to Chicago to make restitution. The restitution was stiff, but when Colonel Tom was appealed to, Sam went to lunch with him, bought a bottle of wine, and stiffened his back.

One afternoon in a room in the Palmer House a scene was played out that for days stayed in Sam's mind as a kind of realisation of the part he wanted to play in the business world. The president of a lumber company took Sam into the room, and, laying five one thousand dollar bills upon a table, walked to the window and stood looking out.

For a moment Sam stood looking at the money on the table and at the back of the man by the window, burning with indignation. He felt that he should like to take hold of the man's throat and press as he had once pressed on the throat of Windy McPherson. And then a cold gleam coming into his eyes he cleared his throat and said, "You are short here; you will have to build this pile higher if you expect to interest me."

The man by the window shrugged his shoulders—he was a slender, young- looking man in a fancy waistcoat—and then turning and taking a roll of bills from his pocket he walked to the table, facing Sam.

"I shall expect you to be reasonable," he said, as he laid the bills on the table.

When the pile had reached twenty thousand, Sam reached out his hand and taking it up put it in his pocket. "You will get a receipt for this when I get back to the office," he said; "it is about what you owe our company for overcharges and crooked material. As for our business, I made a contract with another company this morning."

Having got the buying end of the Rainey Arms Company straightened out to his liking, Sam began spending much time in the shops and, through Colonel Tom, forced big changes everywhere. He discharged useless foremen, knocked out partitions between rooms, pushed everywhere for more and better work. Like the modern efficiency man, he went about with a watch in his hand, cutting out lost motion, rearranging, getting his own way.

It was a time of great agitation. The offices and shops buzzed like bees disturbed and black looks followed him about. But Colonel Tom rose to the situation and went about at Sam's heels, swaggering, giving orders, throwing back his shoulders like a man remade. All day long he was at it, discharging, directing, roaring against waste. When a strike broke out in one of the shops because of innovations Sam had forced upon the workmen there, he got upon a bench and delivered a speech—written by Sam—on a man's place in the organisation and conducting of a great modern industry and his duty to perfect himself as a workman.

Silently, the men picked up their tools and started again for their benches and when he saw them thus affected by his words Colonel Tom brought what threatened to be a squally affair to a hurrahing climax by the announcement of a five per cent increase in the wage scale—that was Colonel Tom's own touch and the rousing reception of it brought a glow of pride to his cheeks.

Although the affairs of the company were still being handled by Colonel Tom, and though he daily more and more asserted himself, the officers and shops, and later the big jobbers and buyers as well as the rich LaSalle Street directors, knew that a new force had come into the company. Men began dropping quietly into Sam's office, asking questions, suggesting, seeking favours. He felt that he was getting hold. Of the department heads, about half fought him and were secretly marked for slaughter; the others came to him, expressed approval of what was going on and asked him to look over their departments and to make suggestions for improvements through them. This Sam did eagerly, getting by it their loyalty and support which later stood him in good stead.

In choosing the new men that came into the company Sam also took a hand. The method used was characteristic of his relations with Colonel Tom. If a man applying for a place suited him, he got admission to the colonel's office and listened for half an hour to a talk anent the fine old traditions of the company. If a man did not suit Sam, he did not get to the colonel. "You can't have your time taken up by them," Sam explained.

In the Rainey Company, the various heads of departments were stockholders in the company, and selected from among themselves two men to sit upon the board, and in his second year Sam was chosen as one of these employee directors. During the same year five heads of departments resigning in a moment of indignation over one of Sam's innovations—to be replaced later by two—their stock by a prearranged agreement came back into the company's hands. This stock and another block, secured for him by the colonel, got into Sam's hands through the use of Eckardt's money, that of the Wabash Avenue woman, and his own snug pile.

Sam was a growing force in the company. He sat on the board of directors, the recognised practical head of the business among its stockholders and employees; he had stopped the company's march toward a second place in its industry and had faced it about. All about him, in offices and shops, there was the swing and go of new life and he felt that he was in a position to move on toward real control and had begun laying lines with that end in view. Standing in the offices in LaSalle Street or amid the clang and roar of the shops he tilted up his chin with the same odd little gesture that had attracted the men of Caxton to him when he was a barefoot newsboy and the son of the town drunkard. Through his head went big ambitious projects. "I have in my hand a great tool," he thought; "with it I will pry my way into the place I mean to occupy among the big men of this city and this nation."



CHAPTER III

Sam McPherson, who stood in the shops among the thousands of employees of the Rainey Arms Company, who looked with unseeing eyes at the faces of the men intent upon the operation of machines and saw in them but so many aids to the ambitious projects stirring in his brain, who, while yet a boy, had because of the quality of daring in him, combined with a gift of acquisitiveness, become a master, who was untrained, uneducated, knowing nothing of the history of industry or of social effort, walked out of the offices of his company and along through the crowded streets to the new apartment he had taken on Michigan Avenue. It was Saturday evening at the end of a busy week and as he walked he thought of things he had accomplished during the week and made plans for the one to come. Through Madison Street he went and into State, seeing the crowds of men and women, boys and girls, clambering aboard the cable cars, massed upon the pavements, forming in groups, the groups breaking and reforming, and the whole making a picture intense, confusing, awe-inspiring. As in the shops among the men workers, so here, also, walked the youth with unseeing eyes. He liked it all; the mass of people; the clerks in their cheap clothing; the old men with young girls on their arms going to dine in restaurants; the young man with a wistful look in his eyes waiting for his sweetheart in the shadow of the towering office building. The eager, straining rush of the whole, seemed no more to him than a kind of gigantic setting for action; action controlled by a few quiet, capable men—of whom he intended to be one—intent upon growth.

In State Street he stopped at a shop and buying a bunch of roses came out again upon the crowded street. In the crowd before him walked a woman— tall, freewalking, with a great mass of reddish-brown hair on her head. As she passed through the crowd men stopped and looked back at her, their eyes ablaze with admiration. Seeing her, Sam sprang forward with a cry.

"Edith!" he called, and running forward thrust the roses into her hand. "For Janet," he said, and lifting his hat walked beside her along State to Van Buren Street.

Leaving the woman at a corner Sam came into a region of cheap theatres and dingy hotels. Women spoke to him; young men in flashy overcoats and with a peculiar, assertive, animal swing to their shoulders loitered before the theatres or in the doorways of the hotels; from an upstairs restaurant came the voice of another young man singing a popular song of the street. "There'll be a hot time in the old town to-night," sang the voice.

Over a cross street Sam went into Michigan Avenue, faced by a long narrow park and beyond the railroad tracks by the piles of new earth where the city was trying to regain its lake front. In the cross street, standing in the shadow of the elevated railroad, he had passed a whining, intoxicated old woman who lurched forward and put a hand upon his coat. Sam had flung her a quarter and passed on shrugging his shoulders. Here also he had walked with unseeing eyes; this too was a part of the gigantic machine with which the quiet, competent men of growth worked.

From his new quarters in the top floor of the hotel facing the lake, Sam walked north along Michigan Avenue to a restaurant where Negro men went noiselessly about among white-clad tables, serving men and women who talked and laughed under the shaded lamps had an assured, confident air. Passing in at the door of the restaurant, a wind, blowing over the city toward the lake, brought the sound of a voice floating with it. "There'll be a hot time in the old town to-night," again insisted the voice.

After dining Sam got on a grip car of the Wabash Avenue Cable, sitting on the front seat and letting the panorama of the town roll up to him. From the region of cheap theatres he passed through streets in which saloons stood massed, one beside another, each with its wide garish doorway and its dimly lighted "Ladies' Entrance," and into a region of neat little stores where women with baskets upon their arms stood by the counters and Sam was reminded of Saturday nights in Caxton.

The two women, Edith and Janet Eberly, met through Jack Prince, to one of whom Sam had sent the roses at the hands of the other, and from whom he had borrowed the six thousand dollars when he was new in the city, had been in Chicago for five years when Sam came to know them. For all of the five years they had lived in a two-story frame building that had been a residence in Wabash Avenue near Thirty-ninth Street and that was now both a residence and a grocery store. The apartment upstairs, reached by a stairway at the side of the grocery, had in the five years, and under the hand of Janet Eberly, become a thing of beauty, perfect in the simplicity and completeness of its appointment.

The two women were the daughters of a farmer who had lived in one of the middle western states facing the Mississippi River. Their grandfather had been a noted man in the state, having been one of its first governors and later serving it in the senate in Washington. There was a county and a good-sized town named for him and he had once been talked of as a vice- presidential possibility but had died at Washington before the convention at which his name was to have been put forward. His one son, a youth of great promise, went to West Point and served brilliantly through the Civil War, afterward commanding several western army posts and marrying the daughter of another army man. His wife, an army belle, died after having borne him the two daughters.

After the death of his wife Major Eberly began drinking, and to get away from the habit and from the army atmosphere where he had lived with his wife, whom he loved intensely, took the two little girls and returned to his home state to settle on a farm.

About the county where the two girls grew to womanhood, their father, Major Eberly, got the name of a character, seeing people but seldom and treating rudely the friendly advances of his farmer neighbours. He would sit in the house for days poring over books, of which he had a great many, and hundreds of which were now on open shelves in the apartment of the two girls. These days of study, during which he would brook no intrusion, were followed by days of fierce industry during which he led team after team to the field, ploughing or reaping day and night with no rest except to eat.

At the edge of the Eberly farm there was a little wooden country church surrounded by a hay field, and on Sunday mornings during the summer the ex-army man was always to be found in the field, running some noisy, clattering agricultural implement up and down under the windows of the church and disturbing the worship of the country folk; in the winter he drew a pile of logs there and went on Sunday mornings to split firewood under the church windows. While his daughters were small he was several times haled into court and fined for cruel neglect of his animals. Once he locked a great herd of fine sheep in a shed and went into the house and stayed for days intent upon his books so that many of them suffered cruelly for want of food and water. When he was taken into court and fined, half the county came to the trial and gloated over his humiliation.

To the two girls the father was neither cruel nor kind, leaving them largely to themselves but giving them no money, so that they went about in dresses made over from those of the mother, that lay piled in trunks in the attic. When they were small, an old Negro woman, an ex-servant of the army belle, lived with and mothered them, but when Edith was a girl of ten this woman went off home to Tennessee, so that the girls were thrown on their own resources and ran the house in their own way.

Janet Eberly was, at the beginning of her friendship with Sam, a slight woman of twenty-seven with a small expressive face, quick nervous fingers, black piercing eyes, black hair and a way of becoming so absorbed in the exposition of a book or the rush of a conversation that her little intense face became transfigured and her quick fingers clutched the arm of her listener while her eyes looked into his and she lost all consciousness of his presence or of the opinions he may have expressed. She was a cripple, having fallen from the loft of a barn in her youth injuring her back so that she sat all day in a specially made reclining wheeled chair.

Edith was a stenographer, working in the office of a publisher down town, and Janet trimmed hats for a milliner a few doors down the street from the house in which they lived. In his will the father left the money from the sale of the farm to Janet, and Sam used it, insuring his life for ten thousand dollars in her name while it was in his possession and handling it with a caution entirely absent from his operations with the money of the medical student. "Take it and make money for me," the little woman had said impulsively one evening shortly after the beginning of their acquaintance and after Jack Prince had been talking flamboyantly of Sam's ability in affairs. "What is the good of having a talent if you do not use it to benefit those who haven't it?"

Janet Eberly was an intellect. She disregarded all the usual womanly points of view and had an attitude of her own toward life and people. In a way she had understood her hard-driven, grey-haired father and during the time of her great physical suffering they had built up a kind of understanding and affection for each other. After his death she wore a miniature of him, made in his boyhood, on a chain about her neck. When Sam met her the two immediately became close friends, sitting for hours in talk and coming to look forward with great pleasure to the evenings spent together.

In the Eberly household Sam McPherson was a benefactor, a wonder-worker. In his hands the six thousand dollars was bringing two thousand a year into the house and adding immeasurably to the air of comfort and good living that prevailed there. To Janet, who managed the house, he was guide, counsellor, and something more than friend.

Of the two women it was the strong, vigorous Edith, with the reddish-brown hair and the air of physical completeness that made men stop to look at her on the street, who first became Sam's friend.

Edith Eberly was strong of body, given to quick flashes of anger, stupid intellectually and hungry to the roots of her for wealth and a place in the world. She had heard, through Jack Prince, of Sam's money making and of his ability and prospects and, for a time, had designs upon his affections. Several times when they were alone together she gave his hand a characteristically impulsive squeeze and once upon the stairway beside the grocery store offered him her lips to kiss. Later there sprang up between her and Jack Prince a passionate love affair, dropped finally by Prince through fear of her violent fits of anger. After Sam had met Janet Eberly and had become her loyal friend and henchman all show of affection or even of interest between him and Edith was at an end and the kiss upon the stairs was forgotten.

* * * * *

Going up the stairway after the ride in the cable car Sam stood beside Janet's wheel chair in the room at the front of the apartment facing Wabash Avenue. The chair was by the window and faced an open coal fire in a grate she had had built into the wall of the house. Outside, through an open arched doorway, Edith moved noiselessly about taking dishes from a little table. He knew that after a time Jack Prince would come and take her to the theatre, leaving Janet and him to finish their talk.

Sam lighted his pipe and between puffs began talking, making a statement that he knew would arouse her, and Janet, putting her hand impulsively on his shoulder, began tearing the statement to bits.

"You talk!" she broke out. "Books are not full of pretence and lies; you business men are—you and Jack Prince. What do you know of books? They are the most wonderful things in the world. Men sit writing them and forget to lie, but you business men never forget. You and books! You haven't read books, not real ones. Didn't my father know; didn't he save himself from insanity through books? Do I not, sitting here, get the real feel of the movement of the world through the books that men write? Suppose I saw those men. They would swagger and strut and take themselves seriously just like you or Jack or the grocer down stairs. You think you know what's going on in the world. You think you are doing things, you Chicago men of money and action and growth. You are blind, all blind."

The little woman, a light, half scorn, half amusement in her eyes, leaned forward and ran her fingers through Sam's hair, laughing down into the astonished face he turned up to her.

"Oh, I'm not afraid, in spite of what Edith and Jack Prince say of you," she went on impulsively. "I like you all right and if I were a well woman I should make love to you and marry you and then see to it there was something in this world for you besides money and tall buildings and men and machines that make guns."

Sam grinned. "You are like your father, driving the mowing machine up and down under the church windows on Sunday mornings," he declared; "you think you could remake the world by shaking your fist at it. I should like to go and see you fined in a court room for starving sheep."

Janet, closing her eyes and lying back in her chair, laughed with delight and declared that they would have a splendid quarrelsome evening.

After Edith had gone out, Sam sat through the evening with Janet, listening to her exposition of life and what she thought it should mean to a strong capable fellow like himself, as he had been listening ever since their acquaintanceship began. In the talk, and in the many talks they had had together, talks that rang in his ears for years, the little black-eyed woman gave him a glimpse into a whole purposeful universe of thought and action of which he had never dreamed, introducing him to a new world of men: methodical, hard-thinking Germans, emotional, dreaming Russians, analytical, courageous Norwegians, Spaniards and Italians with their sense of beauty, and blundering, hopeful Englishmen wanting so much and getting so little; so that at the end of the evening he went out of her presence feeling strangely small and insignificant against the great world background she had drawn for him.

Sam did not understand Janet's point of view. It was all too new and foreign to everything life had taught him, and in his mind he fought her ideas doggedly, clinging to his own concrete, practical thoughts and hopes, but on the train homeward bound, and in his own room later, he turned over and over in his mind the things she had said and tried in a dim way to grasp the bigness of the conception of human life she had got sitting in a wheel chair and looking down into Wabash Avenue.

Sam loved Janet Eberly. No word of that had ever passed between them and he had seen her hand flash out and grasp the shoulder of Jack Prince when she was laying down to him some law of life as she saw it, as it had so often shot out and grasped his own, but had she been able to spring out of the wheel chair he should have taken her hand and gone with her to the clergyman within the hour and in his heart he knew that she would have gone with him gladly.

Janet died suddenly during the second year of Sam's work for the gun company without a direct declaration of affection from him, but during the years when they were much together he thought of her as in a sense his wife and when she died he was desolate, overdrinking night after night and wandering aimlessly through the deserted streets during hours when he should have been asleep. She was the first woman who ever got hold of and stirred his manhood, and she awoke something in him that made it possible for him later to see life with a broadness and scope of vision that was no part of the pushing, energetic young man of dollars and of industry who sat beside her wheeled chair during the evenings on Wabash Avenue.

After Janet's death, Sam did not continue his friendship with Edith, but turned over to her the ten thousand dollars to which the six thousand of Janet's money had grown in his hands and did not see her again.



CHAPTER IV

One night in April Colonel Tom Rainey of the great Rainey Arms Company and his chief lieutenant, young Sam McPherson, treasurer and chairman of the board of directors of the company, slept together in a room in a St. Paul hotel. It was a double room with two beds, and Sam, lying on his pillow, looked across the bed to where the colonel's paunch protruding itself between him and the light from a long narrow window, made a round hill above which the moon just peeped. During the evening the two men had sat for several hours at a table in the grill down stairs while Sam discussed a proposition he proposed making to a St. Paul jobber the next day. The account of the jobber, a large one, had been threatened by Lewis, the Jew manager of the Edwards Arms Company, the Rainey Company's only important western rival, and Sam was full of ideas to checkmate the shrewd trade move the Jew had made. At the table, the colonel had been silent and taciturn, an unusual attitude of mind for him, and Sam lay in bed and looked at the moon gradually working its way over the undulating abdominal hill, wondering what was in his mind. The hill dropped, showing the full face of the moon, and then rose again obliterating it.

"Sam, were you ever in love?" asked the colonel, with a sigh.

Sam turned and buried his face in the pillow and the white covering of his bed danced up and down. "The old fool, has it come to that with him?" he asked himself. "After all these years of single life is he going to begin running after women now?"

He did not answer the colonel's question. "There are breakers ahead for you, old boy," he thought, the figure of quiet, determined, little Sue Rainey, the colonel's daughter, as he had seen her on the rare occasions when he had dined at the Rainey home or she had come into the LaSalle Street offices, coming into his mind. With a quiver of enjoyment of the mental exercise, he tried to imagine the colonel as a swaggering blade among women.

The colonel, oblivious of Sam's mirth and of his silence regarding his experience in the field of love, began talking, making amends for the silence in the grill. He told Sam that he had decided to take to himself a new wife, and confessed that the view of the matter his daughter might take worried him. "Children are so unfair," he complained; "they forget about a man's feelings and can't realise that his heart is still young."

With a smile on his lips, Sam began trying to picture a woman's lying in his place and looking at the moon over the pulsating hill. The colonel continued talking. He grew franker, telling the name of his beloved and the circumstances of their meeting and courtship. "She is an actress, a working girl," he said feelingly. "I met her at a dinner given by Will Sperry one evening and she was the only woman there who did not drink wine. After the dinner we went for a drive together and she told me of her hard life, of her fight against temptations, and of her brother, an artist, she is trying to get started in the world. We have been together a dozen times and have written letters, and, Sam, we have discovered an affinity for each other."

Sam sat up in bed. "Letters!" he muttered. "The old dog is going to get himself involved." He dropped again upon the pillow. "Well, let him. Why need I bother myself?"

The colonel, having begun talking, could not stop. "Although we have seen each other only a dozen times, a letter has passed between us every day. Oh, if you could see the letters she writes. They are wonderful."

A worried sigh broke from the colonel. "I want Sue to invite her to the house, but I am afraid," he complained; "I am afraid she will be wrong- headed about it. Women are such determined creatures. She and my Luella should meet and know each other, but if I go home and tell her she may make a scene and hurt Luella's feelings."

The moon had risen, shedding its light in Sam's eyes, and he turned his back to the colonel and prepared to sleep. The naive credulity of the older man had touched a spring of mirth in him and from time to time the covering of his bed continued to quiver suggestively.

"I would not hurt her feelings for anything. She is the squarest little woman alive," the voice of the colonel announced. The voice broke and the colonel, who habitually roared forth his sentiments, began to dither. Sam wondered if his feelings had been touched by the thoughts of his daughter or of the lady from the stage. "It is a wonderful thing," half sobbed the colonel, "when a young and beautiful woman gives her whole heart into the keeping of a man like me."

It was a week later before Sam heard more of the affair. Looking up from his desk in the offices in LaSalle Street one morning, he found Sue Rainey standing before him. She was a small athletic looking woman with black hair, square shoulders, cheeks browned by the sun and wind, and quiet grey eyes. She stood facing Sam's desk and pulled off a glove while she looked down at him with amused, quizzical eyes. Sam rose, and leaning over the flat-topped desk, took her hand, wondering what had brought her there.

Sue Rainey did not mince matters, but plunged at once into an explanation of the purpose of her visit. From birth she had lived in an atmosphere of wealth. Although she was not counted a beautiful woman, she had, because of her wealth and the charm of her person, been much courted. Sam, who had talked briefly with her a half dozen times, had long had a haunting curiosity to know more of her personality. As she stood there before him looking so wonderfully well-kept and confident he thought her baffling and puzzling.

"The colonel," she began, and then hesitated and smiled. "You, Mr. McPherson, have become a figure in my father's life. He depends upon you very much. He tells me that he has talked with you concerning a Miss Luella London from the theatre, and that you have agreed with him that the colonel and she should marry."

Sam watched her gravely. A flicker of mirth ran through him, but his face was grave and disinterested.

"Yes?" he said, looking into her eyes. "Have you met Miss London?"

"I have," answered Sue Rainey. "Have you?"

Sam shook his head.

"She is impossible," declared the colonel's daughter, clutching the glove held in her hand and staring at the floor. A flush of anger rose in her cheeks. "She is a crude, hard, scheming woman. She colours her hair, she cries when you look at her, she hasn't even the grace to be ashamed of what she is trying to do, and she has got the colonel into a fix."

Sam looked at the brown of Sue Rainey's cheek and thought the texture of it beautiful. He wondered why he had heard her called a plain woman. The heightened colour brought to her face by her anger had, he thought, transfigured her. He liked her direct, forceful way of putting the matter of the colonel's affair, and felt keenly the compliment implied by her having come to him. "She has self-respect," he told himself, and felt a thrill of pride in her attitude as though it had been inspired by himself.

"I have been hearing of you a great deal," she continued, glancing up at him and smiling. "At our house you are brought to the table with the soup and taken away with the liqueur. My father interlards his table talk, and introduces all of his wise new axioms on economy and efficiency and growth, with a constant procession of 'Sam says' and 'Sam thinks.' And the men who come to the house talk of you also. Teddy Foreman says that at directors' meetings they all sit about like children waiting for you to tell them what to do."

She threw out her hand with an impatient little gesture. "I am in a hole," she said. "I might handle my father but I cannot handle that woman."

While she had been talking to him Sam looked past her and out at a window. When her eyes wandered from his face he looked again at her brown firm cheeks. From the beginning of the interview he had been intending to help her.

"Give me the lady's address," he said; "I'll go look her over."

Three evenings later Sam took Miss Luella London to a midnight supper at one of the town's best restaurants. She knew the motive of his taking her, as he had been quite frank in the few minutes' talk near the stage door of the theatre when the engagement was made. As they ate, they talked of the plays at the Chicago theatres, and Sam told her a story of an amateur performance that had once taken place in the hall over Geiger's drug store in Caxton when he was boy. In the performance Sam had taken the role of a drummer boy killed on the field of battle by a swaggering villain in a grey uniform, and John Telfer, in the role of villain, had become so in earnest that, a pistol not exploding at a critical moment, he had chased Sam about the stage trying to hit him with the butt of the weapon while the audience roared with delight at the realism of Telfer's rage and at the frightened boy begging for mercy.

Luella London laughed heartily at Sam's story and then, the coffee being served, she fingered the handle of the cup and a shrewd look came into her eyes.

"And now you are a big business man and have come to see me about Colonel Rainey," she said.

Sam lighted a cigar.

"Just how much are you counting on this marriage between yourself and the colonel?" he asked bluntly.

The actress laughed and poured cream into her coffee. A line came and went on her forehead between her eyes. Sam thought she looked capable.

"I have been thinking of what you told me at the stage door," she said, and a childlike smile played about her lips. "Do you know, Mr. McPherson, I can't just figure you. I can't just see how you get into this. Where are your credentials, anyway?"

Sam, keeping his eyes upon her face, took a jump into the dark.

"It's this way," he said, "I'm something of an adventurer myself. I fly the black flag. I come from where you do. I had to reach out my hand and take what I wanted. I do not blame you in the least, but it just happens that I saw Colonel Tom Rainey first. He is my game and I do not propose to have you fooling around. I am not bluffing. You have got to get off him."

Leaning forward, he stared at her intently, and then lowered his voice. "I've got your record. I know the man you used to live with. He's going to help me get you if you do not drop it."

Sitting back in his chair Sam watched her gravely. He had taken the odd chance to win quickly by a bluff and had won. But Luella London was not to be defeated without a struggle.

"You lie," she cried, half springing from her chair. "Frank has never—"

"Oh yes, Frank has," answered Sam, turning as though to call a waiter; "I will have him here in ten minutes if you wish to be shown."

Picking up a fork the woman began nervously picking holes in the table cloth and a tear appeared upon her cheek. She took a handkerchief from a bag that hung hooked over the back of a chair at the side of the table and wiped her eyes.

"All right! All right!" she said, bracing herself, "I'll drop it. If you've dug up Frank Robson you've got me. He'll do anything you say for a piece of money."

For some minutes the two sat in silence. A tired look had come into the woman's eyes.

"I wish I was a man," she said. "I get whipped at everything I tackle because I'm a woman. I'm getting past my money-making days in the theatre and I thought the colonel was fair game."

"He is," answered Sam dispassionately, "but you see I beat you to it. He's mine."

Glancing cautiously about the room, he took a roll of bills from his pocket and began laying them one at a time upon the table.

"Look here," he said, "you've done a good piece of work. You should have won. For ten years half the society women of Chicago have been trying to marry their daughters or their sons to the Rainey fortune. They had everything to help them, wealth, good looks, and a standing in the world. You have none of these things. How did you do it?

"Anyway," he went on, "I'm not going to see you trimmed. I've got ten thousand dollars here, as good Rainey money as ever was printed. You sign this paper and then put the roll in your purse."

"That's square," said Luella London, signing, and with the light coming back into her eyes.

Sam beckoned to the proprietor of the restaurant whom he knew and had him and a waiter sign as witnesses.

Luella London put the roll of bills into her purse.

"What did you give me that money for when you had me beat anyway?" she asked.

Sam lighted a fresh cigar and folding the paper put it in his pocket.

"Because I like you and I admire your skill," he said, "and anyway I did not have you beaten until right now."

They sat studying the people getting up from the tables and going through the door to waiting carriages and automobiles, the well-dressed women with assured airs serving Sam's mind to make a contrast for the woman who sat with him.

"I presume you are right about women," he said musingly, "it must be a stiff game for you if you like winning on your own hook."

"Winning! We don't win." The lips of the actress drew back showing her white teeth. "No woman ever won who tried to play a straight fighting game for herself."

Her voice grew tense and the lines upon her forehead reappeared.

"Woman can't stand alone," she went on, "she is a sentimental fool. She reaches out her hand to some man and that in the end beats her. Why, even when she plays the game as I played it against the colonel some rat of a man like Frank Robson, for whom she has given up everything worth while to a woman, sells her out."

Sam looked at her hand, covered with rings, lying on the table.

"Let's not misunderstand each other," he said quietly, "do not blame Frank for this. I never knew him. I just imagined him."

A puzzled look came into the woman's eyes and a flush rose in her cheeks.

"You grafter!" she sneered.

Sam called to a passing waiter and ordered a fresh bottle of wine.

"What's the use being sore?" he asked. "It's simple enough. You staked against a better mind. Anyway you have the ten thousand, haven't you?"

Luella reached for her purse.

"I don't know," she said, "I'll look. Haven't you decided to steal it back yet?"

Sam laughed.

"I'm coming to that," he said, "don't hurry me."

For several minutes they sat eyeing each other, and then, with an earnest ring in his voice and a smile on his lips, Sam began talking again.

"Look here!" he said, "I'm no Frank Robson and I do not like giving a woman the worst of it. I have been studying you and I can't see you running around loose with ten thousand dollars of real money on you. You do not fit into the picture and the money will not last a year in your hands.

"Give it to me," he urged; "let me invest it for you. I'm a winner. I'll double it for you in a year."