Then a new phase of life presented itself. To his surprise he found himself looking with more than passing interest at women in the streets, and an old hunger for the companionship of strange women came back to him, in some way coarsened and materialised. One evening at the theatre a woman, a friend of Sue's and the childless wife of a business friend of his own, sat beside him. In the darkness of the playhouse her shoulder nestled down against his. In the excitement of a crisis on the stage her hand slipped into his and her fingers clutched and held his fingers.

Animal desire seized and shook him, a feeling without sweetness, brutal, making his eyes burn. When between the acts the theatre was again flooded with light he looked up guiltily to meet another pair of eyes equally filled with guilty hunger. A challenge had been given and received.

In their car, homeward bound, Sam put the thoughts of the woman away from him and taking Sue in his arms prayed silently for some help against he knew not what.

"I think I will go to Caxton in the morning and have a talk with Mary Underwood," he said.

After his return from Caxton Sam set about finding some new interest to occupy Sue's mind. He had spent an afternoon talking to Valmore, Freedom Smith, and Telfer and thought there was a kind of flatness in their jokes and in their ageing comments on each other. Then he had gone from them for his talk with Mary. Half through the night they had talked, Sam getting forgiveness for not writing and getting also a long friendly lecture on his duty toward Sue. He thought she had in some way missed the point. She had seemed to suppose that the loss of the children had fallen singly upon Sue. She had not counted upon him, and he had depended upon her doing just that. He had come as a boy to his mother wanting to talk of himself and she had wept at the thought of the childless wife and had told him how to set about making her happy.

"Well, I will set about it," he thought on the train coming home; "I will find for her this new interest and make her less dependent upon me. Then I also will take hold anew and work out for myself a programme for a way of life."

One afternoon when he came home from the office he found Sue filled indeed with a new idea. With glowing cheeks she sat beside him through the evening and talked of the beauties of a life devoted to social service.

"I have been thinking things out," she said, her eyes shining. "We must not allow ourselves to become sordid. We must keep to the vision. We must together give the best in our lives and our fortunes to mankind. We must make ourselves units in the great modern movements for social uplift."

Sam looked at the fire and a chill feeling of doubt ran through him. He could not see himself as a unit in anything. His mind did not run out toward the thought of being one of the army of philanthropists or rich social uplifters he had met talking and explaining in the reading rooms of clubs. No answering flame burned in his heart as it had burned that evening by the bridle path in Jackson Park when she had expounded another idea. But the thought of a need of new interest for her coming to him, he turned to her smiling.

"It sounds all right but I know nothing of such things," he said.

After that evening Sue began to get a hold upon herself. The old fire came back into her eyes and she went about the house with a smile upon her face and talked through the evenings to her silent, attentive husband of the life of usefulness, the full life. One day she told him of her election to the presidency of a society for the rescue of fallen women, and he began seeing her name in the newspapers in connection with various charity and civic movements. At the house a new sort of men and women began appearing at the dinner table; a strangely earnest, feverish, half fanatical people, Sam thought, with an inclination toward corsetless dresses and uncut hair, who talked far into the night and worked themselves into a sort of religious zeal over what they called their movement. Sam found them likely to run to startling statements, noticed that they sat on the edges of their chairs when they talked, and was puzzled by their tendency toward making the most revolutionary statements without pausing to back them up. When he questioned a statement made by one of these people, he came down upon him with a rush that quite carried him away and then, turning to the others, looked at them wisely like a cat that has swallowed a mouse. "Ask us another question if you dare," their faces seemed to be saying, while their tongues declared that they were but students of the great problem of right living.

With these new people Sam never made any progress toward real understanding and friendship. For a time he tried honestly to get some of their own fervent devotions to their ideas and to be impressed by what they said of their love of man, even going with them to some of their meetings, at one of which he sat among the fallen women gathered in, and listened to a speech by Sue.

The speech did not make much of a hit, the fallen women moving restlessly about. A large woman, with an immense nose, did better. She talked with a swift, contagious zeal that was very stirring, and, listening to her, Sam was reminded of the evening when he sat before another zealous talker in the church at Caxton and Jim Williams, the barber, tried to stampede him into the fold with the lambs. While the woman talked a plump little member of the demi monde who sat beside Sam wept copiously, but at the end of the speech he could remember nothing of what had been said and he wondered if the weeping woman would remember.

To express his determination to continue being Sue's companion and partner, Sam during one winter taught a class of young men at a settlement house in the factory district of the west side. The class in his hands was unsuccessful. He found the young men heavy and stupid with fatigue after the day of labour in the shops and more inclined to fall asleep in their chairs, or wander away, one at a time, to loaf and smoke on a nearby corner, than to stay in the room listening to the man reading or talking before them.

When one of the young women workers came into the room, they sat up and seemed for the moment interested. Once Sam heard a group of them talking of these women workers on a landing in a darkened stairway. The experience startled Sam and he dropped the class, admitting to Sue his failure and his lack of interest and bowing his head before her accusation of a lack of the love of men.

Later by the fire in his own room he tried to draw for himself a moral from the experience.

"Why should I love these men?" he asked himself. "They are what I might have been. Few of the men I have known have loved me and some of the best and cleanest of them have worked vigorously for my defeat. Life is a battle in which few men win and many are defeated and in which hate and fear play their part with love and generosity. These heavy-featured young men are a part of the world as men have made it. Why this protest against their fate when we are all of us making more and more of them with every turn of the clock?"

During the next year, after the fiasco of the settlement house class, Sam found himself drifting more and more rapidly away from Sue and her new viewpoint of life. The growing gulf between them showed itself in a thousand little household acts and impulses, and every time he looked at her he thought her more apart from him and less a part of the real life that went on within him. In the old days there had been something intimate and familiar in her person and in her presence. She had seemed like a part of him, like the room in which he slept or the coat he wore on his back, and he had looked into her eyes as thoughtlessly and with as little fear of what he might find there as he looked at his own hands. Now when his eyes met hers they dropped, and one or the other of them began talking hurriedly like a person who has a consciousness of something he must conceal.

Down town Sam took up anew his old friendship and intimacy with Jack Prince, going with him to clubs and drinking places and often spending evenings among the clever, money-wasting young men who laughed and made deals and talked their way through life at Jack's side. Among these young men a business associate of Jack's caught his attention and in a few weeks an intimacy had sprung up between Sam and this man.

Maurice Morrison, Sam's new friend, had been discovered by Jack Prince working as a sub-editor on a country daily down the state. There was, Sam thought, something of the Caxton dandy, Mike McCarthy, in the man, combined with prolonged and fervent, although somewhat periodic attacks of industry. In his youth he had written poetry and at one time had studied for the ministry, and in Chicago, under Jack Prince, he had developed into a money maker and led the life of a talented, rather unscrupulous man of the world. He kept a mistress, often overdrank, and Sam thought him the most brilliant and convincing talker he had ever heard. As Jack Prince's assistant he had charge of the Rainey Company's large advertising expenditure, and the two men being thrown often together a mutual regard grew up between them. Sam believed him to be without moral sense; he knew him to be able and honest and he found in the association with him a fund of odd little sweetnesses of character and action that lent an inexpressible charm to the person of his friend.

It was through Morrison that Sam had his first serious misunderstanding with Sue. One evening the brilliant young advertising man dined at the McPhersons'. The table, as usual, was filled with Sue's new friends, among them a tall, gaunt man who, with the arrival of the coffee, began in a high-pitched, earnest voice to talk of the coming social revolution. Sam looked across the table and saw a light dancing in Morrison's eyes. Like a hound unleashed he sprang among Sue's friends, tearing the rich to pieces, calling for the onward advance of the masses, quoting odds and ends of Shelley and Carlyle, peering earnestly up and down the table, and at the end quite winning the hearts of the women by a defence of fallen women that stirred the blood of even his friend and host.

Sam was amused and a trifle annoyed. The whole thing was, he knew, no more than a piece of downright acting with just the touch of sincerity in it that was characteristic of the man but that had no depth or real meaning. During the rest of the evening he watched Sue, wondering if she too had fathomed Morrison and what she thought of his having taken the role of star from the long gaunt man, who had evidently been booked for that part and who sat at the table and wandered afterward among the guests, annoyed and disconcerted.

Late that night Sue came into his room and found him reading and smoking by the fire.

"Cheeky of Morrison, dimming your star," he said, looking at her and laughing apologetically.

Sue looked at him doubtfully.

"I came in to thank you for bringing him," she said; "I thought him splendid."

Sam looked at her and for a moment was tempted to let the matter pass. And then his old inclination to be always open and frank with her asserted itself and he closed the book and rising stood looking down at her.

"The little beast was guying your crowd," he said, "but I do not want him to guy you. Not that he wouldn't try. He has the audacity for anything."

A flush arose to her cheeks and her eyes gleamed.

"That is not true, Sam," she said coldly. "You say that because you are becoming hard and cold and cynical. Your friend Morrison talked from his heart. It was beautiful. Men like you, who have a strong influence over him, may lead him away, but in the end a man like that will come to give his life to the service of society. You should help him; not assume an attitude of unbelief and laugh at him."

Sam stood upon the hearth smoking his pipe and looking at her. He was thinking how easy it would have been in the first year after their marriage to have explained Morrison. Now he felt that he was but making a bad matter worse, but went on determined to stick to his policy of being entirely honest with her.

"Look here, Sue," he began quietly, "be a good sport. Morrison was joking. I know the man. He is the friend of men like me because he wants to be and because it pays him to be. He is a talker, a writer, a talented, unscrupulous word-monger. He is making a big salary by taking the ideas of men like me and expressing them better than we can ourselves. He is a good workman and a generous, open-hearted fellow with a lot of nameless charm in him, but a man of convictions he is not. He could talk tears into the eyes of your fallen women, but he would be a lot more likely to talk good women into their state."

Sam put a hand upon her shoulder.

"Be sensible and do not be offended," he went on: "take the fellow for what he is and be glad for him. He hurts little and cheers a lot. He could make a convincing argument in favour of civilisation's return to cannibalism, but really, you know, he spends most of his time thinking and writing of washing machines and ladies' hats and liver pills, and most of his eloquence after all only comes down to 'Send for catalogue, Department K' in the end."

Sue's voice was colourless with passion when she replied.

"This is unbearable. Why did you bring the fellow here?"

Sam sat down and picked up his book. In his impatience he lied to her for the first time since their marriage.

"First, because I like him and second, because I wanted to see if I couldn't produce a man who could outsentimentalise your socialist friends," he said quietly.

Sue turned and walked out of the room. In a way the action was final and marked the end of understanding between them. Putting down his book Sam watched her go and some feeling he had kept for her and that had differentiated her from all other women died in him as the door closed between them. Throwing the book aside he sprang to his feet and stood looking at the door.

"The old goodfellowship appeal is dead," he thought. "From now on we will have to explain and apologise like two strangers. No more taking each other for granted."

Turning out the light he sat again before the fire to think his way through the situation that faced him. He had no thought that she would return. That last shot of his own had crushed the possibility of that.

The fire was getting low in the grate and he did not renew it. He looked past it toward the darkened windows and heard the hum of motor cars along the boulevard below. Again he was the boy of Caxton hungrily seeking an end in life. The flushed face of the woman in the theatre danced before his eyes. He remembered with shame how he had, a few days before, stood in a doorway and followed with his eyes the figure of a woman who had lifted her eyes to him as they passed in the street. He wished that he might go out of the house for a walk with John Telfer and have his mind filled with eloquence of the standing corn, or sit at the feet of Janet Eberly as she talked of books and of life. He got up and turning on the lights began preparing for bed.

"I know what I will do," he said, "I will go to work. I will do some real work and make some more money. That's the place for me."

And to work he went, real work, the most sustained and clearly thought-out work he had done. For two years he was out of the house at dawn for a long bracing walk in the fresh morning air, to be followed by eight, ten and even fifteen hours in the office and shops; hours in which he drove the Rainey Arms Company's organisation mercilessly and, taking openly every vestige of the management out of the hands of Colonel Tom, began the plans for the consolidation of the American firearms companies that later put his name on the front pages of the newspapers and got him the title of a Captain of Finance.

There is a widespread misunderstanding abroad regarding the motives of many of the American millionaires who sprang into prominence and affluence in the days of change and sudden bewildering growth that followed the close of the Spanish War. They were, many of them, not of the brute trader type, but were, instead, men who thought and acted quickly and with a daring and audacity impossible to the average mind. They wanted power and were, many of them, entirely unscrupulous, but for the most part they were men with a fire burning within them, men who became what they were because the world offered them no better outlet for their vast energies.

Sam McPherson had been untiring and without scruples in the first hard, quick struggle to get his head above the great unknown body of men there in the city. He had turned aside from money getting when he heard what he took to be a call to a better way of life. Now with the fires of youth still in him and with the training and discipline that had come from two years of reading, of comparative leisure and of thought, he was prepared to give the Chicago business world a display of that tremendous energy that was to write his name in the industrial history of the city as one of the first of the western giants of finance.

Going to Sue, Sam told her frankly of his plans.

"I want a free hand in the handling of your stock in the company," he said. "I cannot lead this new life of yours. It may help and sustain you but it gets no hold on me. I want to be myself now and lead my own life in my own way. I want to run the company, really run it. I cannot stand idly by and let life go past. I am hurting myself and you standing here looking on. Also I am in a kind of danger of another kind that I want to avoid by throwing myself into hard, constructive work."

Without question Sue signed the papers he brought her. A flash of her old frankness toward him came back.

"I do not blame you, Sam," she said, smiling bravely. "Things have not gone right, as we both know, but if we cannot work together at least let us not hurt each other."

When Sam returned to give himself again to affairs, the country was just at the beginning of the great wave of consolidation which was finally to sweep all of the financial power of the country into a dozen pairs of competent and entirely efficient hands. With the sure instinct of the born trader Sam had seen this movement coming and had studied it. Now he began to act. Going to that same swarthy-faced lawyer who had drawn the contract for him to secure control of the medical student's twenty thousand dollars and who had jokingly invited him to become one of a band of train robbers, he told him of his plans to begin working toward a consolidation of all the firearms companies of the country.

Webster wasted no time in joking now. He laid out the plans, adjusted and readjusted them to suit Sam's shrewd suggestions, and when a fee was mentioned shook his head.

"I want in on this," he said. "You will need me. I am made for this game and have been waiting for a chance to get at it. Just count me in as one of the promoters if you will."

Sam nodded his head. Within a week he had formed a pool of his own company's stock controlling, as he thought, a safe majority and had begun working to form a similar pool in the stock of his only big western rival.

This last job was not an easy one. Lewis, the Jew, had been making constant headway in that company just as Sam had made headway in the Rainey Company. He was a money maker, a sales manager of rare ability, and, as Sam knew, a planner and executor of business coups of the first class.

Sam did not want to deal with Lewis. He had respect for the man's ability in driving sharp bargains and felt that he would like to have the whip in his own hands when it came to the point of dealing with him. To this end he began visiting bankers and the men who were head of big western trust companies in Chicago and St. Louis. He went about his work slowly, feeling his way and trying to get at each man by some effective appeal, buying the use of vast sums of money by a promise of common stock, the bait of a big active bank account, and, here and there, by the hint of a directorship in the big new consolidated company.

For a time the project moved slowly; indeed there were weeks and months when it did not appear to move at all. Working in secret and with extreme caution Sam encountered many discouragements and went home in the evening day after day to sit among Sue's guests with a mind filled with his own plans and with an indifferent ear turned to the talk of revolution, social unrest, and the new class consciousness of the masses, that rattled and crackled up and down his dinner table. He thought that it must be trying to Sue. He was so evidently not interested in her interests. At the same time he thought that he was working toward what he wanted out of life and went to bed at night believing that he was finding, and would find, a kind of peace in just thinking clearly along one line day after day.

One day Webster, who had wanted to be in on the deal, came to Sam's office and gave his project its first great boost toward success. He, like Sam, thought he saw clearly the tendencies of the times, and was greedy for the block of common stock that Sam had promised should come to him with the completion of the enterprise.

"You are not using me," he said, sitting down before Sam's desk. "What is blocking the deal?"

Sam began to explain and when he had finished Webster laughed.

"Let's get at Tom Edwards of the Edward Arms Company direct," he said, and then, leaning over the desk, "Edwards is a vain little peacock and a second rate business man," he declared emphatically. "Get him afraid and then flatter his vanity. He has a new wife with blonde hair and big soft blue eyes. He wants prominence. He is afraid to venture upon big things himself but is hungry for the reputation and gain that comes through big deals. Use the method the Jew has used; show him what it means to the yellow-haired woman to be the wife of the president of the big consolidated Arms Company. THE EDWARDS CONSOLIDATED, eh? Get at Edwards. Bluff him and flatter him and he is your man."

Sam wondered. Edwards was a small grey-haired man of sixty with something dry and unresponsive about him. Being a silent man, he had created an impression of remarkable shrewdness and ability. After a lifetime spent in hard labour and in the practice of the most rigid economy he had come up to wealth, and had got into the firearms business through Lewis, and it was counted one of the brightest stars in that brilliant Hebrew's crown that he had been able to lead Edwards with him in his daring and audacious handling of the company's affairs.

Sam looked at Webster across the desk and thought of Tom Edwards as the figurehead of the firearms trust.

"I was saving the frosting on the cake for my own Tom," he said; "it was a thing I wanted to hand the colonel."

"Let us see Edwards this evening," said Webster dryly.

Sam nodded, and late that night made the deal that gave him control of the two important western companies and put him in position to move on the eastern companies with every prospect of complete success. To Edwards he went with an exaggerated report of the support he had already got for his project, and having frightened him offered him the presidency of the new company and promised that it should be incorporated under the name of The Edwards Consolidated Firearms Company of America.

The eastern companies fell quickly. With Webster Sam tried on them the old dodge of telling each that the other two had agreed to come in, and it worked.

With the coming in of Edwards and the options given by the eastern companies Sam began to get also the support of the LaSalle Street bankers. The firearms trust was one of the few big consolidations managed wholly in the west, and after two or three of the bankers had agreed to help finance Sam's plan the others began asking to be taken into the underwriting syndicate he and Webster had formed. Within thirty days after the closing of the deal with Tom Edwards Sam felt that he was ready to act.

For several months Colonel Tom had known something of the plans Sam had on foot, and had made no protest. He had in fact given Sam to understand that his stock would be voted with Sue's, controlled by Sam, and with the stock of the other directors who knew of and hoped to share in the profits of Sam's deal. The old gunmaker had all of his life believed that the other American firearms companies were but shadows destined to disappear before the rising sun of the Rainey Company, and thought of Sam's project as an act of providence to further this desirable end.

At the moment of his acquiescence in Webster's plan, for landing Tom Edwards, Sam had a moment of doubt, and now, with the success of his project in sight, he began to wonder how the blustering old man would look upon Edwards as the titular head of the big company and upon the name of Edwards in the title of the company.

For two years Sam had seen little of the colonel, who had given up all pretence to an active part in the management of the business and who, finding Sue's new friends disconcerting, seldom appeared at the house, living at the clubs, playing billiards all day long, or sitting in the club windows boasting to chance listeners of his part in the building of the Rainey Arms Company.

With a mind filled with doubt Sam went home and put the matter before Sue. She was dressed and ready for an evening at the theatre with a party of friends and the talk was brief.

"He will not mind," she said indifferently. "Go ahead and do what you want to do."

Sam rode back to the office and called his lieutenants about him. He felt that the thing might as well be done and over, and with the options in his hands, and the ability he thought he had to control his own company, he was ready to come out into the open and get the deal cleaned up.

The morning papers that carried the story of the proposed big new consolidation of firearms companies carried also an almost life-size halftone of Colonel Tom Rainey, a slightly smaller one of Tom Edwards, and grouped about these, small pictures of Sam, Lewis, Prince, Webster, and several of the eastern men. By the size of the half-tone, Sam, Prince, and Morrison had tried to reconcile Colonel Tom to Edwards' name in the title of the new company and to Edwards' coming election as president. The story also played up the past glories of the Rainey Company and its directing genius, Colonel Tom. One phrase, written by Morrison, brought a smile to Sam's lips.

"This grand old patriarch of American business, retired now from active service, is like a tired giant, who, having raised a brood of young giants, goes into his castle to rest and reflect and to count the scars won in many a hard-fought battle."

Morrison laughed as he read it aloud.

"It ought to get the colonel," he said, "but the newspaper man who prints it should be hung."

"They will print it all right," said Jack Prince.

And they did print it; going from newspaper office to newspaper office Prince and Morrison saw to that, using their influence as big buyers of advertising space and even insisting upon reading proof on their own masterpiece.

But it did not work. Early the next morning Colonel Tom appeared at the offices of the arms company with blood in his eye, and swore that the consolidation should not be put through. For an hour he stormed up and down in Sam's office, his outbursts of wrath varied by periods of childlike pleading for the retention of the name and glory of the Raineys. When Sam shook his head and went with the old man to the meeting that was to pass upon his action and sell the Rainey Company, he knew that he had a fight on his hands.

The meeting was a stormy one. Sam made a talk telling what had been done and Webster, voting some of Sam's proxies, made a motion that Sam's offer for the old company be accepted.

And then Colonel Tom fired his guns. Walking up and down in the room before the men, sitting at a long table or in chairs tilted against the walls, he began talking with all of his old flamboyant pomposity of the past glories of the Rainey Company. Sam watched him quietly thinking of the exhibition as something detached and apart from the business of the meeting. He remembered a question that had come into his head when he was a schoolboy and had got his first peep into a school history. There had been a picture of Indians at the war dance and he had wondered why they danced before rather than after battle. Now his mind answered the question.

"If they had not danced before they might never have got the chance," he thought, and smiled to himself.

"I call upon you men here to stick to the old colours," roared the colonel, turning and making a direct attack upon Sam. "Do not let this ungrateful upstart, this son of a drunken village housepainter, that I picked up from among the cabbages of South Water Street, win you away from your loyalty to the old leader. Do not let him steal by trickery what we have won only by years of effort."

The colonel, leaning on the table, glared about the room. Sam felt relieved and glad of the direct attack.

"It justifies what I am going to do," he thought.

When Colonel Tom had finished Sam gave a careless glance at the old man's red face and trembling fingers. He had no doubt that the outburst of eloquence had fallen upon deaf ears and without comment put Webster's motion to the vote.

To his surprise two of the new employe directors voted their stock with Colonel Tom's, and a third man, voting his own stock as well as that of a wealthy southside real estate man, did not vote. On a count the stock represented stood deadlocked and Sam, looking down the table, raised his eyebrows to Webster.

"Move we adjourn for twenty-four hours," snapped Webster, and the motion carried.

Sam looked at a paper lying before him on the table. During the count of the vote he had been writing over and over on the sheet of paper this sentence.

"The best men spend their lives seeking truth."

Colonel Tom walked out of the room like a conqueror, declining to speak to Sam as he passed, and Sam looked down the table at Webster and made a motion with his head toward the man who had not voted.

Within an hour Sam's fight was won. Pouncing upon the man representing the stock of the south-side investor, he and Webster did not go out of the room until they had secured absolute control of the Rainey Company and the man who had refused to vote had put twenty-five thousand dollars into his pocket. The two employee directors Sam marked for slaughter. Then after spending the afternoon and early evening with the representatives of the eastern companies and their attorneys he drove home to Sue.

It was past nine o'clock when his car stopped before the house and, going at once to his room, he found Sue sitting before his fire, her arms thrown above her head and her eyes staring at the burning coals.

As Sam stood in the doorway looking at her a wave of resentment swept over him.

"The old coward," he thought, "he has brought our fight here to her."

Hanging up his coat he filled his pipe and drawing up a chair sat beside her. For five minutes Sue sat staring into the fire. When she spoke there was a touch of hardness in her voice.

"When everything is said, Sam, you do owe a lot to father," she observed, refusing to look at him.

Sam said nothing and she went on.

"Not that I think we made you, father and I. You are not the kind of man that people make or unmake. But, Sam, Sam, think what you are doing. He has always been a fool in your hands. He used to come home here when you were new with the company and talk of what he was doing. He had a whole new set of ideas and phrases; all that about waste and efficiency and orderly working toward a definite end. It did not fool me. I knew the ideas, and even the phrases he used to express them, were not his and I was not long finding out they were yours, that it was simply you expressing yourself through him. He is a big helpless child, Sam, and he is old. He hasn't much longer to live. Do not be hard, Sam. Be merciful."

Her voice did not tremble but tears ran down her rigid face and her expressive hands clutched at her dress.

"Can nothing change you? Must you always have your own way?" she added, still refusing to look at him.

"It is not true, Sue, that I always want my own way, and people do change me; you have changed me," he said.

She shook her head.

"No, I have not changed you. I found you hungry for something and you thought I could feed it. I gave you an idea that you took hold of and made your own. I do not know where I got it, from some book or hearing some one talk, I suppose. But it belonged to you. You built it and fostered it in me and coloured it with your own personality. It is your idea to-day. It means more to you than all this firearms trust that the papers are full of."

She turned to look at him, and put out her hand and laid it in his.

"I have not been brave," she said. "I am standing in your way. I have had a hope that we would get back to each other. I should have freed you but I hadn't the courage, I hadn't the courage. I could not give up the dream that some day you would really take me back to you."

Getting out of her chair she dropped to her knees and putting her head in his lap, shook with sobs. Sam sat stroking her hair. Her agitation was so great that her muscular little back shook with it.

Sam looked past her at the fire and tried to think clearly. He was not greatly moved by her agitation, but with all his heart he wanted to think things out and get at the right and the honest thing to do.

"It is a time of big things," he said slowly and with an air of one explaining to a child. "As your socialists say, vast changes are going on. I do not believe that your socialists really sense what these changes mean, and I am not sure that I do or that any man does, but I know they mean something big and I want to be in them and a part of them; all big men do; they are struggling like chicks in the shell. Why, look here! What I am doing has to be done and if I do not do it another man will. The colonel has to go. He will be swept aside. He belongs to something old and outworn. Your socialists, I believe, call it the age of competition."

"But not by us, not by you, Sam," she plead. "After all, he is my father."

A stern look came into Sam's eyes.

"It does not ring right, Sue," he said coldly; "fathers do not mean much to me. I choked my own father and threw him into the street when I was only a boy. You knew about that. You heard of it when you went to find out about me that time in Caxton. Mary Underwood told you. I did it because he lied and believed in lies. Do not your friends say that the individual who stands in the way should be crushed?"

She sprang to her feet and stood before him.

"Do not quote that crowd," she burst out. "They are not the real thing. Do you suppose I do not know that? Do I not know that they come here because they hope to get hold of you? Haven't I watched them and seen the look on their faces when you have not come or have not listened to their talk? They are afraid of you, all of them. That's why they talk so bitterly. They are afraid and ashamed that they are afraid."

"Like the workers in the shop?" he asked, musingly.

"Yes, like that, and like me since I failed in my part of our lives and had not the courage to get out of the way. You are worth all of us and for all our talk we shall never succeed or begin to succeed until we make men like you want what we want. They know that and I know it."

"And what do you want?"

"I want you to be big and generous. You can be. Failure cannot hurt you. You and men like you can do anything. You can even fail. I cannot. None of us can. I cannot put my father to that shame. I want you to accept failure."

Sam got up and taking her by the arm led her to the door. At the door he turned her about and kissed her on the lips like a lover.

"All right, Sue girl, I will do it," he said, and pushed her through the door. "Now let me sit down by myself and think things out."

It was a night in September and a whisper of the coming frost was in the air. He threw up the window and took long breaths of the sharp air and listened to the rumble of the elevated road in the distance. Looking up the boulevard he saw the lights of the cyclists making a glistening stream that flowed past the house. A thought of his new motor car and of all of the wonder of the mechanical progress of the world ran through his mind.

"The men who make machines do not hesitate," he said to himself; "even though a thousand fat-hearted men stood in their way they would go on."

A line of Tennyson's came into his mind.

"And the nation's airy navies grappling in the central blue," he quoted, thinking of an article he had read predicting the coming of airships.

He thought of the lives of the workers in steel and iron and of the things they had done and would do.

"They have," he thought, "freedom. Steel and iron do not run home to carry the struggle to women sitting by the fire."

He walked up and down the room.

"Fat old coward. Damned fat old coward," he muttered over and over to himself.

It was past midnight when he got into bed and began trying to quiet himself for sleep. In his dreams he saw a fat man with a chorus girl hanging to his arm kicking his head about a bridge above a swiftly flowing stream.

When he got down to the breakfast room the next morning Sue had gone. By his plate he found a note saying that she had gone for Colonel Tom and would take him to the country for the day. He walked to the office thinking of the incapable old man who, in the name of sentiment, had beaten him in what he thought the big enterprise of his life.

At his desk he found a message from Webster. "The old turkey cock has fled," it said; "we should have saved the twenty-five thousand."

On the phone Webster told Sam of an early visit to the club to see Colonel Tom and that the old man had left the city, going to the country for the day. It was on Sam's lips to tell of his changed plans but he hesitated.

"I will see you at your office in an hour," he said.

Outside again in the open air Sam walked and thought of his promise. Down by the lake he went to where the railroad with the lake beyond stopped him. Upon the old wooden bridge looking over the track and down to the water he stood as he had stood at other crises in his life and thought over the struggle of the night before. In the clear morning air, with the roar of the city behind him and the still waters of the lake in front, the tears, and the talk with Sue seemed but a part of the ridiculous and sentimental attitude of her father, and the promise given her insignificant and unfairly won. He reviewed the scene carefully, the talk and the tears and the promise given as he led her to the door. It all seemed far away and unreal like some promise made to a girl in his boyhood.

"It was never a part of all this," he said, turning and looking at the towering city before him.

For an hour he stood on the wooden bridge. He thought of Windy McPherson putting the bugle to his lips in the streets of Caxton and again there sounded in his ears the roaring laugh of the crowd; again he lay in the bed beside Colonel Tom in that northern city and saw the moon rising over the round paunch and heard the empty chattering talk of love.

"Love," he said, still looking toward the city, "is a matter of truth, not lies and pretence."

Suddenly it seemed to him that if he went forward truthfully he should get even Sue back again some time. His mind lingered over the thoughts of the loves that come to a man in the world, of Sue in the wind-swept northern woods and of Janet in her wheel-chair in the little room where the cable cars ran rumbling under the window. And he thought of other things, of Sue reading papers culled out of books before the fallen women in the little State Street hall, of Tom Edwards with his new wife and his little watery eyes, of Morrison and the long-fingered socialist fighting over words at his table. And then pulling on his gloves he lighted a cigar and went back through the crowded streets to his office to do the thing he had determined on.

At the meeting that afternoon the project went through without a dissenting voice. Colonel Tom being absent, the two employe directors voted with Sam with almost panicky haste as Sam looking across at the well-dressed, cool-headed Webster, laughed and lighted a fresh cigar. And then he voted the stock Sue had intrusted to him for the project, feeling that in doing so he was cutting, perhaps for all time, the knot that bound them.

With the completion of the deal Sam stood to win five million dollars, more money than Colonel Tom or any of the Raineys had ever controlled, and had placed himself in the eyes of the business men of Chicago and New York where before he had placed himself in the eyes of Caxton and South Water Street. Instead of another Windy McPherson failing to blow his bugle before the waiting crowd, he was still the man who made good, the man who achieved, the kind of man of whom America boasts before the world.

He did not see Sue again. When the news of his betrayal reached her she went off east taking Colonel Tom with her, and Sam closed the house, even sending a man there for his clothes. To her eastern address, got from her attorney, he wrote a brief note offering to make over to her or to Colonel Tom his entire winnings from the deal and closed it with the brutal declaration, "At the end I could not be an ass, even for you."

To this note Sam got a cold, brief reply telling him to dispose of her stock in the company and of that belonging to Colonel Tom, and naming an eastern trust company to receive the money. With Colonel Tom's help she had made a careful estimate of the values of their holdings at the time of consolidation and refused flatly to accept a penny beyond that amount.

Sam felt that another chapter of his life was closed. Webster, Edwards, Prince, and the eastern men met and elected him chairman of the board of directors of the new company and the public bought eagerly the river of common stock he turned upon the market, Prince and Morrison doing masterful work in the moulding of public opinion through the press. The first board meeting ended with a dinner at which wine flowed in rivulets and Edwards, getting drunk, stood up at his place and boasted of the beauty of his young wife. And Sam, at his desk in his new offices in the Rookery, settled down grimly to the playing of his role as one of the new kings of American business.



CHAPTER IX

The story of Sam's life there in Chicago for the next several years ceases to be the story of a man and becomes the story of a type, a crowd, a gang. What he and the group of men surrounding him and making money with him did in Chicago, other men and other groups of men have done in New York, in Paris, in London. Coming into power with the great expansive wave of prosperity that attended the first McKinley administration, these men went mad of money making. They played with great industrial institutions and railroad systems like excited children, and a man of Chicago won the notice and something of the admiration of the world by his willingness to bet a million dollars on the turn of the weather. In the years of criticism and readjustment that followed this period of sporadic growth, writers have told with great clearness how the thing was done, and some of the participants, captains of industry turned penmen, Caesars become ink- slingers, have bruited the story to an admiring world.

Given the time, the inclination, the power of the press, and the unscrupulousness, the thing that Sam McPherson and his followers did in Chicago in not difficult. Advised by Webster and the talented Prince and Morrison to handle his publicity work, he rapidly unloaded his huge holdings of common stock upon an eager public, keeping for himself the bonds which he hypothecated at the banks to increase his working capital while continuing to control the company. When the common stock was unloaded, he, with a group of fellow spirits, began an attack upon it through the stock market and in the press, and bought it again at a low figure, holding it ready to unload when the public should have forgotten.

The annual advertising expenditure of the firearms trust ran into millions and Sam's hold upon the press of the country was almost unbelievably strong. Morrison rapidly developed unusual daring and audacity in using this instrument and making it serve Sam's ends. He suppressed facts, created illusions, and used the newspapers as a whip to crack at the heels of congressmen, senators, and legislators, of the various states, when such matters as appropriation for firearms came before them.

And Sam, who had undertaken the consolidation of the firearms companies, having a dream of himself as a great master in that field, a sort of American Krupp, rapidly awoke from the dream to take the bigger chances for gain in the world of speculation. Within a year he dropped Edwards as head of the firearms trust and in his place put Lewis, with Morrison as secretary and manager of sales. Guided by Sam these two, like the little drygoods merchant of the old Rainey Company, went from capital to capital and from city to city making contracts, influencing news, placing advertising contracts where they would do the most good, fixing men.

And in the meantime Sam, with Webster, a banker named Crofts who had profited largely in the firearms merger, and sometimes Morrison or Prince, began a series of stock raids, speculations, and manipulations that attracted country-wide attention, and became known to the newspaper reading world as the McPherson Chicago crowd. They were in oil, railroads, coal, western land, mining, timber, and street railways. One summer Sam, with Prince, built, ran to a profit, and sold to advantage a huge amusement park. Through his head day after day marched columns of figures, ideas, schemes, more and more spectacular opportunities for gain. Some of the enterprises in which he engaged, while because of their size they seemed more dignified, were of reality of a type with the game smuggling of his South Water Street days, and in all of his operations it was his old instinct for bargains and for the finding of buyers together with Webster's ability for carrying through questionable deals that made him and his followers almost constantly successful in the face of opposition from the more conservative business and financial men of the city.

Again Sam led a new life, owning running horses at the tracks, memberships in many clubs, a country house in Wisconsin, and shooting preserves in Texas. He drank steadily, played poker for big stakes, kept in the public prints, and day after day led his crew upon the high seas of finance. He did not dare think and in his heart he was sick of it. Sick to the soul, so that when thought came to him he got out of his bed to seek roistering companions or, getting pen and paper, sat for hours figuring out new and more daring schemes for money making. The great forward movement in modern industry of which he had dreamed of being a part had for him turned out to be a huge meaningless gamble with loaded dice against a credulous public. With his followers he went on day after day doing deeds without thought. Industries were organised and launched, men employed and thrown out of employment, towns wrecked by the destruction of an industry and other towns made by the building of other industries. At a whim of his a thousand men began building a city on an Indiana sand hill, and at a wave of his hand another thousand men of an Indiana town sold their homes, with the chicken houses in the back-yards and vines trained by the kitchen doors, and rushed to buy sections of the hill plotted off for them. He did not stop to discuss with his followers the meaning of the things he did. He told them of the profits to be made and then, having done the thing, he went with them to drink in bar rooms and to spend the evening or afternoon singing songs, visiting his stable of runners or, more often, sitting silently about the card table playing for high stakes. Making millions through the manipulation of the public during the day, he sometimes sat half the night struggling with his companions for the possession of thousands.

Lewis, the Jew, the only one of Sam's companions who had not followed him in his spectacular money making, stayed in the office of the firearms company and ran it like the scientific able man of business he was. While Sam remained chairman of the board of the company and had an office, a desk, and the name of leadership there, he let Lewis run the place, and spent his own time upon the stock exchange or in some corner with Webster and Crofts planning some new money making raid.

"You have the better of it, Lewis," he said one day in a reflective mood; "you thought I had cut the ground from under you when I got Tom Edwards, but I only set you more firmly in a larger place."

He made a movement with his hand toward the large general offices with the rows of busy clerks and the substantial look of work being done.

"I might have had the work you are doing. I planned and schemed with that end in view," he added, lighting a cigar and going out at the door.

"And the money hunger got you," laughed Lewis, looking after him, "the hunger that gets Jews and Gentiles and all who feed it."

One might have come upon the McPherson Chicago crowd about the old Chicago stock exchange on any day during those years, Crofts, tall, abrupt, and dogmatic; Morrison, slender, dandified, and gracious; Webster, well- dressed, suave, gentlemanly, and Sam, silent, restless, and often morose and ugly. Sometimes it seemed to Sam that they were all unreal, himself and the men with him. He watched his companions cunningly. They were constantly posing before the passing crowd of brokers and small speculators. Webster, coming up to him on the floor of the exchange, would tell him of a snowstorm raging outside with the air of a man parting with a long-cherished secret. His companions went from one to the other vowing eternal friendships, and then, keeping spies upon each other, they hurried to Sam with tales of secret betrayals. Into any deal proposed by him they went eagerly, although sometimes fearfully, and almost always they won. And with Sam they made millions through the manipulation of the firearms company, and the Chicago and Northern Lake Railroad which he controlled.

In later years Sam looked back upon it all as a kind of nightmare. It seemed to him that never during that period had he lived or thought sanely. The great financial leaders that he saw were not, he thought, great men. Some of them, like Webster, were masters of craft, or, like Morrison, of words, but for the most part they were but shrewd, greedy vultures feeding upon the public or upon each other.

In the meantime Sam was rapidly degenerating. His paunch became distended, and his hands trembled in the morning. Being a man of strong appetites, and having a determination to avoid women, he almost constantly overdrank and overate, and in the leisure hours that came to him he hurried eagerly from place to place, avoiding thought, avoiding sane quiet talk, avoiding himself.

All of his companions did not suffer equally. Webster seemed made for the life, thriving and expanding under it, putting his winnings steadily aside, going on Sunday to a suburban church, avoiding the publicity connecting his name with race horses and big sporting events that Crofts sought and to which Sam submitted. One day Sam and Crofts caught him in an effort to sell them out to a group of New York bankers in a mining deal and turned the trick on him instead, whereupon he went off to New York to become a respectable big business man and the friend of senators and philanthropists.

Crofts was a man with chronic domestic troubles, one of those men who begin each day by cursing their wives before their associates and yet continue living with them year after year. There was a kind of rough squareness in the man, and after the completion of a successful deal he would be as happy as a boy, pounding men on the back, shaking with laughter, throwing money about, making crude jokes. After Sam left Chicago he finally divorced his wife and married an actress from the vaudeville stage and after losing two-thirds of his fortune in an effort to capture control of a southern railroad, went to England and, coached by the actress wife, developed into an English country gentleman.

And Sam was a man sick. Day after day he went on drinking more and more heavily, playing for bigger and bigger stakes, allowing himself less and less thought of himself. One day he received a long letter from John Telfer telling of the sudden death of Mary Underwood and berating him for his neglect of her.

"She was ill for a year and without an income," wrote Telfer. Sam noticed that the man's hand had begun to tremble. "She lied to me and told me you had sent her money, but now that she is dead I find that though she wrote you she got no answer. Her old aunt told me."

Sam put the letter into his pocket and going into one of his clubs began drinking with a crowd of men he found idling there. He had paid little attention to his correspondence for months. No doubt the letter from Mary had been received by his secretary and thrown aside with the letters of thousands of other women, begging letters, amorous letters, letters directed at him because of his wealth and the prominence given his exploits by the newspapers.

After wiring an explanation and mailing a check the size of which filled John Telfer with admiration, Sam with a half dozen fellow roisterers spent the late afternoon and evening going from saloon to saloon through the south side. When he got to his apartments late that night, his head was reeling and his mind filled with distorted memories of drinking men and women and of himself standing on a table in some obscure drinking place and calling upon the shouting, laughing hangers-on of his crowd of rich money spenders to think and to work and to seek Truth.

He went to sleep in his chair, his mind filled with the dancing faces of dead women, Mary Underwood and Janet and Sue, tear-stained faces calling to him. When he awoke and shaved he went out into the street and to another down-town club.

"I wonder if Sue is dead, too," he muttered, remembering his dream.

At the club he was called to the telephone by Lewis, who asked him to come at once to his office at the Edwards Consolidated. When he got there he found a wire from Sue. In a moment of loneliness and despondency over the loss of his old business standing and reputation, Colonel Tom had shot himself in a New York hotel.

Sam sat at his desk, fingering the yellow paper lying before him and fighting to get his head clear.

"The old coward. The damned old coward," he muttered; "any one could have done that."

When Lewis came into Sam's office he found his chief sitting at his desk fingering the telegram and muttering to himself. When Sam handed him the wire he came around and stood beside Sam, his hand upon his shoulder.

"Well, do not blame yourself for that," he said, with quick understanding.

"I don't," Sam muttered; "I do not blame myself for anything. I am a result, not a cause. I am trying to think. I am not through yet. I am going to begin again when I get things thought out."

Lewis went out of the room leaving him to his thoughts. For an hour he sat there reviewing his life. When he came to the day that he had humiliated Colonel Tom, there came back to his mind the sentence he had written on the sheet of paper while the vote was being counted. "The best men spend their lives seeking truth."

Suddenly he came to a decision and, calling Lewis, began laying out a plan of action. His head cleared and the ring came back into his voice. To Lewis he gave an option on his entire holdings of Edwards Consolidated stocks and bonds and to him also he entrusted the clearing up of deal after deal in which he was interested. Then, calling a broker, he began throwing a mass of stock on the market. When Lewis told him that Crofts was 'phoning wildly about town to find him, and was with the help of another banker supporting the market and taking Sam's stocks as fast as offered, he laughed and giving Lewis instructions regarding the disposal of his monies walked out of the office, again a free man and again seeking the answer to his problem.

He made no attempt to answer Sue's wire. He was restless to get at something he had in his mind. He went to his apartments and packed a bag and from there disappeared saying goodbye to no one. In his mind was no definite idea of where he was going or what he was going to do. He knew only that he would follow the message his hand had written. He would try to spend his life seeking truth.



BOOK III

CHAPTER I

One day when the youth Sam McPherson was new in the city he went on a Sunday afternoon to a down-town theatre to hear a sermon. The sermon was delivered by a small dark-skinned Boston man, and seemed to the young McPherson scholarly and well thought out.

"The greatest man is he whose deeds affect the greatest number of lives," the speaker had said, and the thought had stuck in Sam's mind. Now walking along the street carrying his travelling bag, he remembered the sermon and the thought and shook his head in doubt.

"What I have done here in this city must have affected thousands of lives," he mused, and felt a quickening of his blood at just letting go of his thoughts as he had not dared do since that day when, by breaking his word to Sue, he had started on his career as a business giant.

He began to think of the quest on which he had started and had keen satisfaction in the thought of what he should do.

"I will begin all over and come up to Truth through work," he told himself. "I will leave the money hunger behind me, and if it returns I will come back here to Chicago and see my fortune piled up and the men rushing about the banks and the stock exchange and the court they pay to such fools and brutes as I have been, and that will cure me."

Into the Illinois Central Station he went, a strange spectacle. A smile came to his lips as he sat on a bench along the wall between an immigrant from Russia and a small plump farmer's wife who held a banana in her hand and gave bites of it to a rosy-cheeked babe lying in her arms. He, an American multimillionaire, a man in the midst of his money-making, one who had realised the American dream, to have sickened at the feast and to have wandered out of a fashionable club with a bag in his hand and a roll of bills in his pocket and to have come on this strange quest—to seek Truth, to seek God. A few years of the fast greedy living in the city, that had seemed so splendid to the Iowa boy and to the men and women who had lived in his town, and then a woman had died lonely and in want in that Iowa town, and half across the continent a fat blustering old man had shot himself in a New York hotel, and here he sat.

Leaving his bag in the care of the farmer's wife, he walked across the room to the ticket window and standing there watched the people with definite destinations in mind come up, lay down money, and taking their tickets go briskly away. He had no fear of being known. Although his name and his picture had been upon the front pages of Chicago newspapers for years, he felt so great a change within himself from just the resolution he had taken that he had no doubt of passing unnoticed.

A thought struck him. Looking up and down the long room filled with its strangely assorted clusters of men and women a sense of the great toiling masses of people, the labourers, the small merchants, the skilled mechanics, came over him.

"These are the Americans," he began telling himself, "these people with children beside them and with hard daily work to be done, and many of them with stunted or imperfectly developed bodies, not Crofts, not Morrison and I, but these others who toil without hope of luxury and wealth, who make up the armies in times of war and raise up boys and girls to do the work of the world in their turn."

He fell into the line moving toward the ticket window behind a sturdy- looking old man who carried a box of carpenter tools in one hand and a bag in the other, and bought a ticket to the same Illinois town to which the old man was bound.

In the train he sat beside the old man and the two fell into quiet talk— the old man talking of his family. He had a son, married and living in the Illinois town to which he was going, of whom he began boasting. The son, he said, had gone to that town and had prospered there, owning a hotel which his wife managed while he worked as a builder.

"Ed," he said, "keeps fifty or sixty men going all summer. He has sent for me to come and take charge of a gang. He knows well enough I will get the work out of them."

From Ed the old man drifted into talk of himself and his life, telling bare facts with directness and simplicity and making no effort to disguise a slight turn of vanity in his success.

"I have raised seven sons and made them all good workmen and they are all doing well," he said.

He told of each in detail. One, who had taken to books, was a mechanical engineer in a manufacturing town in New England. The mother of his children had died the year before and of his three daughters two had married mechanics. The third, Sam gathered, had not done well and from something the old man said he thought she had perhaps gone the wrong way there in Chicago.

To the old man Sam talked of God and of a man's effort to get truth out of life.

"I have thought of it a lot," he said.

The old man was interested. He looked at Sam and then out at the car window and began talking of his own beliefs, the substance of which Sam could not get.

"God is a spirit and lives in the growing corn," said the old man, pointing out the window at the passing fields.

He began talking of churches and of ministers, against whom he was filled with bitterness.

"They are dodgers. They do not get at things. They are damned dodgers, pretending to be good," he declared.

Sam talked of himself, saying that he was alone in the world and had money. He said that he wanted work in the open air, not for the money it would bring him, but because his paunch was large and his hand trembled in the morning.

"I've been drinking," he said, "and I want to work hard day after day so that my muscles may become firm and sleep come to me at night."

The old man thought that his son could find Sam a place.

"He's a driver—Ed is," he said, laughing, "and he won't pay you much. Ed don't let go of money. He's a tight one."

Night had come when they reached the town where Ed lived, and the three men walked over a bridge, beneath which roared a waterfall, toward the long poorly-lighted main street of the town and Ed's hotel. Ed, a young, broad-shouldered man, with a dry cigar stuck in the corner of his mouth, led the way. He had engaged Sam standing in the darkness on the station platform, accepting his story without comment.

"I'll let you carry timbers and drive nails," he said, "that will harden you up."

On the way over the bridge he talked of the town.

"It's a live place," he said, "we are getting people in here."

"Look at that!" he exclaimed, chewing at the cigar and pointing to the waterfall that foamed and roared almost under the bridge. "There's a lot of power there and where there's power there will be a city."

At Ed's hotel some twenty men sat about a long low office. They were, for the most part, middle-aged working men and sat in silence reading and smoking pipes. At a table pushed against the wall a bald-headed young man with a scar on his cheek played solitaire with a greasy pack of cards, and in front of him and sitting in a chair tilted against the wall a sullen- faced boy idly watched the game. When the three men came into the office the boy dropped his chair to the floor and stared at Ed who stared back at him. It was as though a contest of some sort went on between them. A tall neatly-dressed woman, with a brisk manner and pale, inexpressive, hard blue eyes, stood back of a little combined desk and cigar case at the end of the room, and as the three walked toward her she looked from Ed to the sullen-faced boy and then again at Ed. Sam concluded she was a woman bent on having her own way. She had that air.

"This is my wife," said Ed, introducing Sam with a wave of his hand and passing around the end of the desk to stand by her side.

Ed's wife twirled the hotel register about facing Sam, nodded her head, and then, leaning over the desk, bestowed a quick kiss upon the leathery cheek of the old carpenter.

Sam and the old man found a place in chairs along the wall and sat down among the silent men. The old man pointed to the boy in the chair beside the card players.

"Their son," he whispered cautiously.

The boy looked at his mother, who in turn looked steadily at him, and got up from his chair. Back of the desk Ed talked in low tones to his wife. The boy, stopping before Sam and the old man and still looking toward the woman, put out his hand which the old man took. Then, without speaking, he went past the desk and through a doorway, and began noisily climbing a flight of stairs, followed by his mother. As they climbed they berated each other, their voices rising to a high pitch and echoing through the upper part of the house.

Ed, coming across to them, talked to Sam about the assignment of a room, and the men began looking at the stranger; noting his fine clothes, their eyes filled with curiosity.

"Selling something?" asked a large red-haired young man, rolling a quid of tobacco in his mouth.

"No," replied Sam shortly, "going to work for Ed."

The silent men in chairs along the wall dropped their newspapers and stared, and the bald-headed young man at the table sat with open mouth, a card held suspended in the air. Sam had become, for the moment, a centre of interest and the men stirred in their chairs and began to whisper and point to him.

A large, watery-eyed man, with florid cheeks, clad in a long overcoat with spots down the front, came in at the door and passed through the room bowing and smiling to the men. Taking Ed by the arm he disappeared into a little barroom, where Sam could hear him talking in low tones.

After a little while the florid-faced man came and put his head through the barroom door into the office.

"Come on, boys," he said, smiling and nodding right and left, "the drinks are on me."

The men got up and filed into the bar, the old man and Sam remaining seated in their chairs. They began talking in undertones.

"I'll start 'em thinking—these men," said the old man.

From his pocket he took a pamphlet and gave it to Sam. It was a crudely written attack upon rich men and corporations.

"Some brains in the fellow who wrote that," said the old carpenter, rubbing his hands together and smiling.

Sam did not think so. He sat reading it and listening to the loud, boisterous voices of the men in the barroom. The florid-faced man was explaining the details of a proposed town bond issue. Sam gathered that the water power in the river was to be developed.

"We want to make this a live town," said the voice of Ed, earnestly.

The old man, leaning over and putting his hand beside his mouth, began whispering to Sam.

"I'll bet there is a capitalist deal back of that power scheme," he said.

He nodded his head up and down and smiled knowingly.

"If there is Ed will be in on it," he added. "You can't lose Ed. He's a slick one."

He took the pamphlet from Sam's hand and put it in his pocket.

"I'm a socialist," he explained, "but don't say anything. Ed's against 'em."

The men filed back into the room, each with a freshly-lighted cigar in his mouth, and the florid-faced man followed them and went out at the office door.

"Well, so long, boys," he shouted heartily.

Ed went silently up the stairs to join the mother and boy, whose voices could still be heard raised in outbursts of wrath from above as the men took their former chairs along the wall.

"Well, Bill's sure all right," said the red-haired young man, evidently expressing the opinion of the men in regard to the florid-faced man.

A small bent old man with sunken cheeks got up and walking across the room leaned against the cigar case.

"Did you ever hear this one?" he asked, looking about.

Obviously no answer could be given and the bent old man launched into a vile pointless anecdote of a woman, a miner, and a mule, the crowd giving close attention and laughing uproariously when he had finished. The socialist rubbed his hands together and joined in the applause.

"That was a good one, eh?" he commented, turning to Sam.

Sam, picking up his bag, climbed the stairway as the red-haired young man launched into another tale, slightly less vile. In his room to which Ed, meeting him at the top of the stairs, led him, still chewing at the unlighted cigar, he turned out the light and sat on the edge of the bed. He was as homesick as a boy.

"Truth," he muttered, looking through the window to the dimly-lighted street. "Do these men seek truth?"

The next day he went to work, wearing a suit of clothes bought from Ed. He worked with Ed's father, carrying timbers and driving nails as directed by him. In the gang with him were four men, boarders at Ed's hotel, and four other men who lived in the town with their families. At the noon hour he asked the old carpenter how the men from the hotel, who did not live in the town, could vote on the question of the power bonds. The old man grinned and rubbed his hands together.

"I don't know," he said. "I suppose Ed tends to that. He's a slick one, Ed is."

At work, the men who had been so silent in the office of the hotel were alert and wonderfully busy, hurrying here and there at a word from the old man and sawing and nailing furiously. They seemed bent upon outdoing each other and when one fell behind they laughed and shouted at him, asking him if he had decided to quit for the day. But though they seemed determined to outdo him the old man kept ahead of them all, his hammer beating a rattling tattoo upon the boards all day. At the noon hour he had given each of the men one of the pamphlets from his pocket and on the way back to his hotel in the evening he told Sam that the others had tried to show him up.

"They wanted to see if I had juice in me," he explained, strutting beside Sam with an amusing little swagger of his shoulders.

Sam was sick with fatigue. His hands were blistered, his legs felt weak, and a terrible thirst burned in his throat. All day he had gone grimly ahead, thankful for every physical discomfort, every throb of his strained, tired muscles. In his weariness and in his efforts to keep pace with the others he had forgotten Colonel Tom and Mary Underwood.

All during that month and into the next Sam stayed with the old man's gang. He ceased thinking, and only worked desperately. An odd feeling of loyalty and devotion to the old man came over him and he felt that he too must prove that he had the juice in him. At the hotel he went to bed immediately after the silent dinner, slept, awoke aching, and went to work again.

One Sunday one of the men of his gang came to Sam's room and invited him to go with a party of the workers into the country. They went in boats, carrying with them kegs of beer, to a deep ravine clothed on both sides by heavy woods. In the boat with Sam sat the red-haired young man, who was called Jake and who talked loudly of the time they would have in the woods, and boasted that he was the instigator of the trip.

"I thought of it," he said over and over again.

Sam wondered why he had been invited. It was a soft October day and in the ravine he sat looking at the trees splashed with colour and breathing deeply of the air, his whole body relaxed, grateful for the day of rest. Jake came and sat beside him.

"What are you?" he asked bluntly. "We know you are no working man."

Sam told him a half-truth.

"You are right enough about that; I have money enough not to have to work. I used to be a business man. I sold guns. But I have a disease and the doctors have told me that if I do not work out of doors part of me will die."

The man from his own gang who had invited him on the trip came up to them, bringing Sam a foaming glass of beer. He shook his head.

"The doctor says it will not do," he explained to the two men.

The red-haired man called Jake began talking.

"We are going to have a fight with Ed," he said. "That's what we came up here to talk about. We want to know where you stand. We are going to see if we can't make him pay as well for the work here as men are paid for the same work in Chicago."

Sam lay back upon the grass.

"All right," he said. "Go ahead. If I can help I will. I'm not so fond of Ed."

The men began talking among themselves. Jake, standing among them, read aloud a list of names among which was the name Sam had written on the register at Ed's hotel.

"It's a list of the names of men we think will stick together and vote together on the bond issue," he explained, turning to Sam. "Ed's in that and we want to use our votes to scare him into giving us what we want. Will you stay with us? You look like a fighter."

Sam nodded and getting up joined the men about the beer kegs. They began talking of Ed and of the money he had made in the town.

"He's done a lot of town work here and there's been graft in all of it," explained Jake emphatically. "It's time he was being made to do the right thing."

While they talked Sam sat watching the men's faces. They did not seem vile to him now as they had seemed that first evening in the hotel office. He began thinking of them silently and alertly at work all day long, surrounded by such influences as Ed and Bill, and the thought sweetened his opinion of them.

"Look here," he said, "tell me of this matter. I was a business man before I came here and I may be able to help you fellows get what you want."

Getting up, Jake took Sam's arm and they walked down the ravine, Jake explaining the situation in the town.

"The game," he said, "is to make the taxpayers pay for a millrace to be built for the development of the water power in the river and then, by a trick, to turn it over to a private company. Bill and Ed are both in the deal and they are working for a Chicago man named Crofts. He's been up here at the hotel with Bill talking to Ed. I've figured out what they are up to." Sam sat down upon a log and laughed heartily.

"Crofts, eh?" he exclaimed. "Say, we will fight this thing. If Crofts has been up here you can depend upon it there is some size to the deal. We will just smash the whole crooked gang for the good of the town."

"How would you do that?" asked Jake.

Sam sat down on a log and looked at the river flowing past the mouth of the ravine.

"Just fight," he said. "Let me show you something."

He took a pencil and slip of paper from his pocket, and, with the voices of the men about the beer kegs in his ears and the red-haired man peering over his shoulder, began writing his first political pamphlet. He wrote and erased and changed words and phrases. The pamphlet was a statement of facts as to the value of water power, and was addressed to the taxpayers of the community. He warmed to the subject, saying that a fortune lay sleeping in the river, and that the town, by the exercise of a little discretion now, could build with that fortune a beautiful city belonging to the people.

"This fortune in the river rightly managed will pay the expenses of government and give you control of a great source of revenue forever," he wrote. "Build your millrace, but look out for a trick of the politicians. They are trying to steal it. Reject the offer of the Chicago banker named Crofts. Demand an investigation. A capitalist has been found who will take the water power bonds at four per cent and back the people in this fight for a free American city." Across the head of the pamphlet Sam wrote the caption, "A River Paved With Gold," and handed it to Jake, who read it and whistled softly.

"Good!" he said. "I will take this and have it printed. It will make Bill and Ed sit up."

Sam took a twenty-dollar bill from his pocket and gave it to the man.

"To pay for the printing," he said. "And when we have them licked I am the man who will take the four per cent bonds."

Jake scratched his head. "How much do you suppose the deal is worth to Crofts?"

"A million, or he would not bother," Sam answered.

Jake folded the paper and put it in his pocket.

"This would make Bill and Ed squirm, eh?" he laughed.

Going home down the river the men, filled with beer, sang and shouted as the boats, guided by Sam and Jake, floated along. The night fell warm and still and Sam thought he had never seen the sky so filled with stars. His brain was busy with the idea of doing something for the people.

"Perhaps here in this town I shall make a start toward what I am after," he thought, his heart filled with happiness and the songs of the tipsy workmen ringing in his ears.

All through the next few weeks there was an air of something astir among the men of Sam's gang and about Ed's hotel. During the evening Jake went among the men talking in low tones, and once he took a three days' vacation, telling Ed that he did not feel well and spending the time among the men employed in the plough works up the river. From time to time he came to Sam for money.

"For the campaign," he said, winking and hurrying away.

Suddenly a speaker appeared and began talking nightly from a box before a drug store on Main Street, and after dinner the office of Ed's hotel was deserted. The man on the box had a blackboard hung on a pole, on which he drew figures estimating the value of the power in the river, and as he talked he grew more and more excited, waving his arms and inveighing against certain leasing clauses in the bond proposal. He declared himself a follower of Karl Marx and delighted the old carpenter who danced up and down in the road and rubbed his hands.

"It will come to something—this will—you'll see," he declared to Sam.

One day Ed appeared, riding in a buggy, at the job where Sam worked, and called the old man into the road. He sat pounding one hand upon the other and talking in a low voice. Sam thought the old man had perhaps been indiscreet in the distribution of the socialistic pamphlets. He seemed nervous, dancing up and down beside the buggy and shaking his head. Then hurrying back to where the men worked he pointed over his shoulder with his thumb.

"Ed wants you," he said, and Sam noticed that his voice trembled and his hand shook.

In the buggy Ed and Sam rode in silence. Again Ed chewed at an unlighted cigar.

"I want to talk with you," he had said as Sam climbed into the buggy.

At the hotel the two men got out of the buggy and went into the office. Inside the door Ed, who came behind, sprang forward and pinioned Sam's arms with his own. He was as powerful as a bear. His wife, the tall woman with the inexpressive eyes, came running into the room, her face drawn with hatred. In her hand she carried a broom and with the handle of this she struck Sam several swinging blows across the face, accompanying each blow with a half scream of rage and a volley of vile names. The sullen- faced boy, alive now and with eyes burning with zeal, came running down the stairs and pushed the woman aside. He struck Sam time after time in the face with his fist, laughing each time as Sam winced under the blows.

Sam struggled furiously to escape Ed's powerful grasp. It was the first time he had ever been beaten and the first time he had faced hopeless defeat. The wrath within him was so intense that the jolting impact of the blows seemed a secondary matter to the need of escaping Ed's vice-like grasp.

Suddenly Ed turned and, pushing Sam before him, threw him through the office door and into the street. In falling his head struck against a hitching post and he lay stunned. When he partially recovered from the fall Sam got up and walked along the street. His face was swollen and bruised and his nose bled. The street was deserted and the assault upon him had been unnoticed.

He went to a hotel on Main Street—a more pretentious place than Ed's, near the bridge leading to the station—and as he passed in he saw, through an open door, Jake, the red-haired man, leaning against the bar and talking to Bill, the man with the florid face. Sam, paying for a room, went upstairs and to bed.

In the bed, with cold bandages on his bruised face, he tried to get the situation in hand. Hatred for Ed ran through his veins. His hands clenched, his brain whirled, and the brutal, passionate faces of the woman and the boy danced before his eyes.

"I'll fix them, the brutal bullies," he muttered aloud.

And then the thought of his quest came back to his mind and quieted him. Through the window came the roar of the waterfall, broken by noises of the street. As he fell asleep they mingled with his dreams, sounding soft and quiet like the low talk of a family about the fire of an evening.

He was awakened by a noise of pounding on his door. At his call the door opened and the face of the old carpenter appeared. Sam laughed and sat up in bed. Already the cold bandages had soothed the throbbing of his bruised face.

"Go away," begged the old man, rubbing his hands together nervously. "Get out of town."

He put his hand to his mouth and talked in a hoarse whisper, looking back over his shoulder through the open door. Sam, getting out of bed, began filling his pipe.

"You can't beat Ed, you fellows," added the old man, backing out at the door. "He's a slick one, Ed is. You better get out of town."

Sam called a boy and gave him a note to Ed asking for his clothes and for the bag in his room, and to the boy he gave a large bill, asking him to pay anything due. When the boy came back bringing the clothes and the bag he returned the bill unbroken.

"They're scared about something up there," he said, looking at Sam's bruised face.

Sam dressed carefully and went down into the street. He remembered that he had never seen a printed copy of the political pamphlet written in the ravine and realised that Jake had used it to make money for himself.

"Now I shall try something else," he thought.

It was early evening and crowds of men coming down the railroad track from the plough works turned to right and left as they reached Main Street. Sam walked among them, climbing a little hilly side street to a number he had got from a clerk at the drug store before which the socialist had talked. He stopped at a little frame house and a moment after knocking was in the presence of the man who had talked night after night from the box in the street. Sam had decided to see what could be done through him. The socialist was a short, fat man, with curly grey hair, shiny round cheeks, and black broken teeth. He sat on the edge of his bed and looked as if he had slept in his clothes. A corncob pipe lay smoking among the covers of the bed, and during most of the talk he sat with one shoe held in his hand as though about to put it on. About the room in orderly piles lay stack after stack of paper-covered books. Sam sat down in a chair by the window and told his mission.

"It is a big thing, this power steal that is going on here," he explained. "I know the man back of it and he would not bother with a small affair. I know they are going to make the city build the millrace and then steal it. It will be a big thing for your party about here if you take hold and stop them. Let me tell you how it can be done."

He explained his plan, and told of Crofts and of his wealth and dogged, bullying determination. The socialist seemed beside himself. He pulled on the shoe and began running hurriedly about the room.

"The time for the election," Sam went on, "is almost here. I have looked into this thing. We must beat this bond issue and then put through a square one. There is a train out of Chicago at seven o'clock, a fast train. You get fifty speakers out here. I will pay for a special train if necessary and I will hire a band and help stir things up. I can give you facts enough to shake this town to the bottom. You come with me and 'phone to Chicago. I will pay everything. I am McPherson, Sam McPherson of Chicago."

The socialist ran to a closet and began pulling on his coat. The name affected him so that his hand trembled and he could scarcely get his arm into the coat sleeve. He began to apologise for the appearance of the room and kept looking at Sam with the air of one not able to believe what he had heard. As the two men walked out of the house he ran ahead holding doors open for Sam's passage.

"And you will help us, Mr. McPherson?" he exclaimed. "You, a man of millions, will help us in this fight?"

Sam had a feeling that the man was going to kiss his hand or do something equally ridiculous. He had the air of a club door man gone off his head.

At the hotel Sam stood in the lobby while the fat man waited in a telephone booth.

"I will have to 'phone Chicago, I will simply have to 'phone Chicago. We socialists don't do anything like this offhand, Mr. McPherson," he had explained as they walked along the street.

When the socialist came out of the booth he stood before Sam shaking his head. His whole attitude had changed, and he looked like a man caught doing a foolish or absurd thing.

"Nothing doing, nothing doing, Mr. McPherson," he said, starting for the hotel door.

At the door he stopped and shook his finger at Sam.

"It won't work," he said, emphatically. "Chicago is too wise."

Sam turned and went back to his room. His name had killed his only chance to beat Crofts, Jake, Bill and Ed. In his room he sat looking out of the window into the street.

"Where shall I take hold now?" he asked himself.

Turning out the lights he sat listening to the roar of the waterfall and thinking of the events of the last week.

"I have had a time," he thought. "I have tried something and even though it did not work it has been the best fun I have had for years."

The hours slipped away and night came on. He could hear men shouting and laughing in the street, and going downstairs he stood in a hallway at the edge of the crowd that gathered about the socialist. The orator shouted and waved his hand. He seemed as proud as a young recruit who has just passed through his first baptism of fire.

"He tried to make a fool of me—McPherson of Chicago—the millionaire—one of the capitalist kings—he tried to bribe me and my party."

In the crowd the old carpenter was dancing in the road and rubbing his hands together. With the feeling of a man who had finished a piece of work or turned the last leaf of a book, Sam went back to his hotel.

"In the morning I shall be on my way," he thought.

A knock came at the door and the red-haired man came in. He closed the door softly and winked at Sam.

"Ed made a mistake," he said, and laughed. "The old man told him you were a socialist and he thought you were trying to spoil the graft. He is scared about that beating you got and mighty sorry. He's all right—Ed is —and he and Bill and I have got the votes. What made you stay under cover so long? Why didn't you tell us you were McPherson?"

Sam saw the hopelessness of any attempt to explain. Jake had evidently sold out the men. Sam wondered how.

"How do you know you can deliver the votes?'" he asked, trying to lead Jake on.

Jake rolled the quid in his mouth and winked again.

"It was easy enough to fix the men when Ed, Bill and I got together," he said. "You know about the other. There's a clause in the act authorising the bond issue, a sleeper, Bill calls it. You know more about that than I do. Anyway the power will be turned over to the man we say."

"But how do I know you can deliver the votes?"

Jake threw out his hand impatiently.

"What do they know?" he asked sharply. "What they want is more wages. There's a million in the power deal and they can't any more realise a million than they can tell what they want to do in Heaven. I promised Ed's fellows the city scale. Ed can't kick. He'll make a hundred thousand as it stands. Then I promised the plough works gang a ten per cent raise. We'll get it for them if we can, but if we can't, they won't know it till the deal is put through."

Sam walked over and held open the door.

"Good night," he said.

Jake looked annoyed.

"Ain't you even going to make a bid against Crofts?" he asked. "We ain't tied to him if you do better by us. I'm in this thing because you put me in. That piece you wrote up the river scared 'em stiff. I want to do the right thing by you. Don't be sore about Ed. He wouldn't a done it if he'd known."

Sam shook his head and stood with his hand still on the door.

"Good night," he said again. "I am not in it. I have dropped it. No use trying to explain."



CHAPTER II

For weeks and months Sam led a wandering vagabond life, and surely a stranger or more restless vagabond never went upon the road. In his pocket he had at almost any time from one to five thousand dollars, his bag went on from place to place ahead of him, and now and then he caught up with it, unpacked it, and wore a suit of his former Chicago clothes upon the streets of some town. For the most part, however, he wore the rough clothes bought from Ed, and, when these were gone, others like them, with a warm canvas outer jacket, and for rough weather a pair of heavy boots lacing half way up the legs. Among the people, he passed for a rather well-set-up workman with money in his pocket going his own way.

During all those months of wandering, and even when he had returned to something nearer his former way of life, his mind was unsettled and his outlook on life disturbed. Sometimes it seemed to him that he, among all men, was a unique, an innovation. Day after day his mind ground away upon his problem and he was determined to seek and to keep on seeking until he found for himself a way of peace. In the towns and in the country through which he passed he saw the clerks in the stores, the merchants with worried faces hurrying into banks, the farmers, brutalised by toil, dragging their weary bodies homeward at the coming of night, and told himself that all life was abortive, that on all sides of him it wore itself out in little futile efforts or ran away in side currents, that nowhere did it move steadily, continuously forward giving point to the tremendous sacrifice involved in just living and working in the world. He thought of Christ going about seeing the world and talking to men, and thought that he too would go and talk to them, not as a teacher, but as one seeking eagerly to be taught. At times he was filled with longing and inexpressible hopes and, like the boy of Caxton, would get out of bed, not now to stand in Miller's pasture watching the rain on the surface of the water, but to walk endless miles through the darkness getting the blessed relief of fatigue into his body and often paying for and occupying two beds in one night.

Sam wanted to go back to Sue; he wanted peace and something like happiness, but most of all he wanted work, real work, work that would demand of him day after day the best and finest in him so that he would be held to the need of renewing constantly the better impulses of his mind. He was at the top of his life, and the few weeks of hard physical exertion as a driver of nails and a bearer of timbers had begun to restore his body to shapeliness and strength, so that he was filled anew with all of his native restlessness and energy; but he was determined that he would not again pour himself out in work that would react upon him as had his money making, his dream of beautiful children, and this last half-formed dream of a kind of financial fatherhood to the Illinois town.

The incident with Ed and the red-haired man had been his first serious effort at anything like social service achieved through controlling or attempting to influence the public mind, for his was the type of mind that runs to the concrete, the actual. As he sat in the ravine talking to Jake, and, later, coming home in the boat under the multitude of stars, he had looked up from among the drunken workmen and his mind had seen a city built for a people, a city independent, beautiful, strong, and free, but a glimpse of a red head through a barroom door and a socialist trembling before a name had dispelled the vision. After his return from hearing the socialist, who in his turn was hedged about by complicated influences, and in those November days when he walked south through Illinois, seeing the late glory of the trees and breathing the fine air, he laughed at himself for having had the vision. It was not that the red-haired man had sold him out, it was not the beating given him by Ed's sullen-faced son or the blows across the face at the hands of his vigorous wife—it was just that at bottom he did not believe the people wanted reform; they wanted a ten per cent raise in wages. The public mind was a thing too big, too complicated and inert for a vision or an ideal to get at and move deeply.