And then, walking on the road and struggling to find truth even within himself, Sam had to come to something else. At bottom he was no leader, no reformer. He had not wanted the free city for a free people, but as a work to be done by his own hand. He was McPherson, the money maker, the man who loved himself. The fact, not the sight of Jake hobnobbing with Bill or the timidity of the socialist, had blocked his way to work as a political reformer and builder.

Tramping south between the rows of shocked corn he laughed at himself. "The experience with Ed and Jake has done something for me," he thought. "They bullied me. I have been a kind of bully myself and what has happened has been good medicine for me."

Sam walked the roads of Illinois, Ohio, New York, and other states, through hill country and flat country, in the snow drifts of winter and through the storms of spring, talking to people, asking their way of life and the end toward which they worked. At night he dreamed of Sue, of his boyhood struggles in Caxton, of Janet Eberly sitting in her chair and talking of writers of books, or, visualising the stock exchange or some garish drinking place, he saw again the faces of Crofts, Webster, Morrison, and Prince intent and eager as he laid before them some scheme of money making. Sometimes at night he awoke, seized with horror, seeing Colonel Tom with the revolver pressed against his head; and sitting in his bed, and all through the next day he talked aloud to himself.

"The damned old coward," he shouted into the darkness of his room or into the wide peaceful prospect of the countryside.

The idea of Colonel Tom as a suicide seemed unreal, grotesque, horrible. It was as though some round-cheeked, curly-headed boy had done the thing to himself. The man had been so boyishly, so blusteringly incompetent, so completely and absolutely without bigness and purpose.

"And yet," thought Sam, "he has found strength to whip me, the man of ability. He has taken revenge, absolute and unanswerable, for the slight I put upon the little play world in which he had been king."

In fancy Sam could see the great paunch and the little white pointed beard sticking up from the floor in the room where the colonel lay dead, and into his mind came a saying, a sentence, the distorted remembrance of a thought he had got from a book of Janet's or from some talk he had heard, perhaps at his own dinner table.

"It is horrible to see a fat man with purple veins in his face lying dead."

At such times he hurried along the road like one pursued. People driving past in buggies and seeing him and hearing the stream of talk that issued from his lips, turned and watched him out of sight. And Sam, hurrying and seeking relief from the thoughts in his mind, called to the old commonsense instincts within himself as a captain marshals his forces to withstand an attack.

"I will find work. I will find work. I will seek Truth," he said.

Sam avoided the larger towns or went hurriedly through them, sleeping night after night at village hotels or at some hospitable farmhouse, and daily he increased the length of his walks, getting real satisfaction from the aching of his legs and from the bruising of his unaccustomed feet on the hard road. Like St. Jerome, he had a wish to beat upon his body and subdue the flesh. In turn he was blown upon by the wind, chilled by the winter frost, wet by the rains, and warmed by the sun. In the spring he swam in rivers, lay on sheltered hillsides watching the cattle grazing in the fields and the white clouds floating across the sky, and constantly his legs became harder and his body more flat and sinewy. Once he slept for a night in a straw stack at the edge of a woods and in the morning was awakened by a farmer's dog licking his face.

Several times he came up to vagabonds, umbrella menders and other roadsters, and walked with them, but he found in their society no incentive to join in their flights across country on freight trains or on the fronts of passenger trains. Those whom he met and with whom he talked and walked did not interest him greatly. They had no end in life, sought no ideal of usefulness. Walking and talking with them, the romance went out of their wandering life. They were utterly dull and stupid, they were, almost without exception, strikingly unclean, they wanted passionately to get drunk, and they seemed to be forever avoiding life with its problems and responsibilities. They always talked of the big cities, of "Chi" and "Cinci" and "Frisco," and were bent upon getting to one of these places. They condemned the rich and begged and stole from the poor, talked swaggeringly of their personal courage and ran whimpering and begging before country constables. One of them, a tall, leering youth in a grey cap, who came up to Sam one evening at the edge of a village in Indiana, tried to rob him. Full of his new strength and with the thought of Ed's wife and the sullen-faced son in his mind, Sam sprang upon him and had revenge for the beating received in the office of Ed's hotel by beating this fellow in his turn. When the tall youth had partially recovered from the beating and had staggered to his feet, he ran off into the darkness, stopping when well out of reach to hurl a stone that splashed in the mud of the road at Sam's feet.

Everywhere Sam sought people who would talk to him of themselves. He had a kind of faith that a message would come to him out of the mouth of some simple, homely dweller of the villages or the farms. A woman, with whom he talked in the railroad station at Fort Wayne, Indiana, interested him so that he went into a train with her and travelled all night in the day coach, listening to her talk of her three sons, one of whom had weak lungs and had, with two younger brothers, taken up government land in the west. The woman had been with them for some months, helping them to get a start.

"I was raised on a farm and knew things they could not know," she told Sam, raising her voice above the rumble of the train and the snoring of fellow passengers.

She had worked with her sons in the field, ploughing and planting, had driven a team across country, carrying boards for the building of a house, and had grown brown and strong at the work.

"And Walter is getting well. His arms are as brown as my own and he has gained eleven pounds," she said, rolling up her sleeves and showing her heavy, muscular forearms.

She planned to take her husband, a machinist working in a bicycle factory in Buffalo, and her two grown daughters, clerks in a drygoods store, with her and return to the new country, and having a sense of her hearer's interest in her story, she talked of the bigness of the west and the loneliness of the vast, silent plains, saying that they sometimes made her heart ache. Sam thought she had in some way achieved success, although he did not see how her experience could serve as a guide to him.

"You have got somewhere. You have got hold of a truth," he said, taking her hand when he got off the train at Cleveland, at dawn.

At another time, in the late spring, when he was tramping through southern Ohio, a man drove up beside him, and pulling in his horse, asked, "Where are you going?" adding genially, "I may be able to give you a lift."

Sam looked at him and smiled. Something in the man's manner or in his dress suggesting the man of God, he assumed a bantering air.

"I am on my way to the New Jerusalem," he said seriously. "I am one who seeks God."

The young minister picked up his reins with a look of alarm, but when he saw a smile playing about the corners of Sam's mouth, he turned the wheels of his buggy.

"Get in and come along with me and we will talk of the New Jerusalem," he said.

On the impulse Sam got into the buggy, and driving along the dusty road, told the essential parts of his story and of his quest for an end toward which he might work.

"It would be simple enough if I were without money and driven by hard necessity, but I am not. I want work, not because it is work and will bring me bread and butter, but because I need to be doing something that will satisfy me when I am done. I do not want so much to serve men as to serve myself. I want to get at happiness and usefulness as for years I got at money making. There is a right way of life for such a man as me, and I want to find that way."

The young minister, who was a graduate of a Lutheran seminary at Springfield, Ohio, and had come out of college with a very serious outlook on life, took Sam to his house and together they sat talking half the night. He had a wife, a country girl with a babe lying at her breast, who got supper for them, and who, after supper, sat in the shadows in a corner of the living-room listening to their talk.

The two men sat together. Sam smoked his pipe and the minister poked at a coal fire that burned in a stove. They talked of God and of what the thought of God meant to men; but the young minister did not try to give Sam an answer to his problem; on the contrary, Sam found him strikingly dissatisfied and unhappy in his way of life.

"There is no spirit of God here," he said, poking viciously at the coals in the stove. "The people here do not want me to talk to them of God. They have no curiosity about what He wants of them nor of why He has put them here. They want me to tell them of a city in the sky, a kind of glorified Dayton, Ohio, to which they can go when they have finished this life of work and of putting money in the savings bank."

For several days Sam stayed with the clergyman, driving about the country with him and talking of God. In the evening they sat in the house, continuing their talks, and on Sunday Sam went to hear the man preach in his church.

The sermon was a disappointment to Sam. Although his host had talked vigorously and well in private, his public address was stilted and unnatural.

"The man," thought Sam, "has no feeling for public address and is not treating his people well in not giving them, without reservation, the ideas he has expounded to me in his house." He decided there was something to be said for the people who sat patiently listening week after week and who gave the man the means of a living for so lame an effort.

One evening when Sam had been with them for a week the young wife came to him as he stood on the little porch before the house.

"I wish you would go away," she said, standing with her babe in her arms and looking at the porch floor. "You stir him up and make him dissatisfied."

Sam stepped off the porch and hurried off up the road into the darkness. There had been tears in the wife's eyes.

In June he went with a threshing crew, working among labourers and eating with them in the fields or about the crowded tables of farmhouses where they stopped to thresh. Each day Sam and the men with him worked in a new place and had as helpers the farmer for whom they threshed and several of his neighbours. The farmers worked at a killing pace and the men of the threshing crew were expected to keep abreast of each new lot of them day after day. At night the threshermen, too weary for talk, crept into the loft of a barn, slept until daylight and then began another day of heartbreaking toil. On Sunday morning they went for a swim in some creek and in the afternoon sat in a barn or under the trees of an orchard sleeping or indulging in detached, fragmentary bits of talk, talk that never rose above a low, wearisome level. For hours they would try to settle a dispute as to whether a horse they had seen at some farm during the week had three, or four, white feet, and one man in the crew never talked at all, sitting on his heels through the long Sunday afternoons and whittling at a stick with his pocket knife.

The threshing outfit with which Sam worked was owned by a man named Joe, who was in debt for it to the maker and who, after working with the men all day, drove about the country half the night making deals with farmers for other days of threshing. Sam thought that he looked constantly on the point of collapse through overwork and worry, and one of the men, who had been with Joe through several seasons, told Sam that at the end of the season their employer did not have enough money left from his season of work to pay the interest on the debt for his machines and that he continually took jobs for less than the cost of doing them.

"One has to keep going," said Joe, when one day Sam began talking to him on the matter.

When told to keep Sam's wage until the end of the season he looked relieved and at the end of the season came to Sam, looking more worried and said that he had no money.

"I will give you a note bearing good interest if you can let me have a little time," he said.

Sam took the note and looked at the pale, drawn face peering out of him from the shadows at the back of the barn.

"Why do you not drop the whole thing and begin working for some one else?" he asked.

Joe looked indignant.

"A man wants independence," he said.

When Sam got again upon the road he stopped at a little bridge over a stream, and tearing up Joe's note watched the torn pieces of it float away upon the brown water.



CHAPTER III

Through the summer and early fall Sam continued his wanderings. The days on which something happened or on which something outside himself interested or attracted him were special days, giving him food for hours of thought, but for the most part he walked on and on for weeks, sunk in a kind of healing lethargy of physical fatigue. Always he tried to get at people who came into his way and to discover something of their way of life and the end toward which they worked, and many an open-mouthed, staring man and woman he left behind him on the road and on the sidewalks of the villages. He had one principle of action; whenever an idea came into his mind he did not hesitate, but began trying at once the practicability of living by following the idea, and although the practice brought him to no end and only seemed to multiply the difficulties of the problem he was striving to work out, it brought him many strange experiences.

At one time he was for several days a bartender in a saloon in a town in eastern Ohio. The saloon was in a small wooden building facing a railroad track and Sam had gone in there with a labourer met on the sidewalk. It was a stormy night in September at the end of his first year of wandering and while he stood by a roaring coal stove, after buying drinks for the labourer and cigars for himself, several men came in and stood by the bar drinking together. As they drank they became more and more friendly, slapping each other on the back, singing songs and boasting. One of them got out upon the floor and danced a jig. The proprietor, a round-faced man with one dead eye, who had himself been drinking freely, put a bottle upon the bar and coming up to Sam, began complaining that he had no bartender and had to work long hours.

"Drink what you want, boys, and then I'll tell you what you owe," he said to the men standing along the bar.

Watching the men who drank and played like school boys about the room, and looking at the bottle sitting on the bar, the contents of which had for the moment taken the sombre dulness out of the lives of the workmen, Sam said to himself, "I will take up this trade. It may appeal to me. At least I shall be selling forgetfulness and not be wasting my life with this tramping on the road and thinking."

The saloon in which he worked was a profitable one and although in an obscure place had made its proprietor what is called "well fixed." It had a side door opening into an alley and one went up this alley to the main street of the town. The front door looking upon the railroad tracks was but little used, perhaps at the noon hour two or three young men from the freight depot down the tracks would come in by it and stand about drinking beer, but the trade that came down the alley and in at the side door was prodigious. All day long men hurried in at this door, took drinks and hurried out again, looking up the alley and running quickly when they found the way clear. These men all drank whiskey, and when Sam had worked for a few days in the place he once made the mistake of reaching for the bottle when he heard the door open.

"Let them ask for it," said the proprietor gruffly. "Do you want to insult a man?"

On Saturday the place was filled all day with beer-drinking farmers, and at odd hours on other days men came in, whimpering and begging drinks. When alone in the place, Sam looked at the trembling fingers of these men and put the bottle before them, saying, "Drink all you want of the stuff."

When the proprietor was in, the men who begged drinks stood a moment by the stove and then went out thrusting their hands into their coat pockets and looking at the floor.

"Bar flies," the proprietor explained laconically.

The whiskey was horrible. The proprietor mixed it himself and put it into stone jars that stood under the bar, pouring it out of these into bottles as they became empty. He kept on display in glass cases bottles of well known brands of whiskey, but when a man came in and asked for one of these brands Sam handed him a bottle bearing that label from beneath the bar, a bottle previously filled by Al from the jugs of his own mixture. As Al sold no mixed drinks Sam was compelled to know nothing the bartender's art and stood all day handing out Al's poisonous stuff and the foaming glasses of beer the workingmen drank in the evening.

Of the men coming in at the side door, a shoe merchant, a grocer, the proprietor of a restaurant, and a telegraph operator interested Sam most. Several times each day these men would appear, glance back over their shoulders at the door, and then turning to the bar would look at Sam apologetically.

"Give me a little out of the bottle, I have a bad cold," they would say, as though repeating a formula.

At the end of the week Sam was on the road again. The rather bizarre notion that by staying there he would be selling forgetfulness of life's unhappiness had been dispelled during his first day's duty, and his curiosity concerning the customers was his undoing. As the men came in at the side door and stood before him Sam leaned over the bar and asked them why they drank. Some of the men laughed, some swore at him, and the telegraph operator reported the matter to Al, calling Sam's question an impertinence.

"You fool, don't you know better than to be throwing stones at the bar?" Al roared, and with an oath discharged him.



CHAPTER IV

One fine warm morning in the fall Sam was sitting in a little park in the centre of a Pennsylvania manufacturing town watching men and women going through the quiet streets to the factories and striving to overcome a feeling of depression aroused by an experience of the evening before. He had come into town over a poorly made clay road running through barren hills, and, depressed and weary, had stood on the shores of a river, swollen by the early fall rains, that flowed along the edges of the town.

Before him in the distance he had looked into the windows of a huge factory, the black smoke from which added to the gloom of the scene that lay before him. Through the windows of the factory, dimly seen, workers ran here and there, appearing and disappearing, the glare of the furnace fire lighting now one, now another of them, sharply. At his feet the tumbling waters that rolled and pitched over a little dam fascinated him. Looking closely at the racing waters his head, light from physical weariness, reeled, and in fear of falling he had been compelled to grip firmly the small tree against which he leaned. In the back yard of a house across the stream from Sam and facing the factory four guinea hens sat on a board fence, their weird, plaintive cries making a peculiarly fitting accompaniment to the scene that lay before him, and in the yard itself two bedraggled fowls fought each other. Again and again they sprang into the fray, striking out with bills and spurs. Becoming exhausted, they fell to picking and scratching among the rubbish in the yard, and when they had a little recovered renewed the struggle. For an hour Sam had looked at the scene, letting his eyes wander from the river to the grey sky and to the factory belching forth its black smoke. He had thought that the two feebly struggling fowls, immersed in their pointless struggle in the midst of such mighty force, epitomised much of man's struggle in the world, and, turning, had gone along the sidewalks and to the village hotel, feeling old and tired. Now on the bench in the little park, with the early morning sun shining down through the glistening rain drops clinging to the red leaves of the trees, he began to lose the sense of depression that had clung to him through the night.

A young man who walked in the park saw him idly watching the hurrying workers, and stopped to sit beside him.

"On the road, brother?" he asked.

Sam shook his head, and the other began talking.

"Fools and slaves," he said earnestly, pointing to the men and women passing on the sidewalk. "See them going like beasts to their bondage? What do they get for it? What kind of lives do they lead? The lives of dogs."

He looked at Sam for approval of the sentiment he had voiced.

"We are all fools and slaves," said Sam, stoutly.

Jumping to his feet the young man began waving his arms about.

"There, you talk sense," he cried. "Welcome to our town, stranger. We have no thinkers here. The workers are like dogs. There is no solidarity among them. Come and have breakfast with me."

In the restaurant the young man began talking of himself. He was a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. His father had died while he was yet in school and had left him a modest fortune, upon the income of which he lived with his mother. He did no work and was enormously proud of the fact.

"I refuse to work! I scorn it!" he declared, shaking a breakfast roll in the air.

Since leaving school he had devoted himself to the cause of the socialist party in his native town, and boasted of the leadership he had already achieved. His mother, he declared, was disturbed and worried because of his connection with the movement.

"She wants me to be respectable," he said sadly, and added, "What's the use trying to explain to a woman? I can't get her to see the difference between a socialist and a direct-action anarchist and I've given up trying. She expects me to end by blowing somebody up with dynamite or by getting into jail for throwing bricks at the borough police."

He talked of a strike going on among some girl employes of a Jewish shirtwaist factory in the town, and Sam, immediately interested, began asking questions, and after breakfast went with his new acquaintance to the scene of the strike.

The shirtwaist factory was located in a loft above a grocery store, and on the sidewalk in front of the store three girl pickets were walking up and down. A flashily dressed Hebrew, with a cigar in his mouth and his hands in his trousers pockets, stood in the stairway leading to the loft and looked closely at the young socialist and Sam. From his lips came a stream of vile words which he pretended to be addressing to the empty air. When Sam walked towards him he turned and ran up the stairs, shouting oaths over his shoulder.

Sam joined the three girls, and began talking to them, walking up and down with them before the grocery store.

"What are you doing to win?" he asked when they had told him of their grievances.

"We do what we can!" said a Jewish girl with broad hips, great motherly breasts, and fine, soft, brown eyes, who appeared to be a leader and spokesman among the strikers. "We walk up and down here and try to get a word with the strikebreakers the boss has brought in from other towns, when they go in and come out."

Frank, the University man, spoke up. "We are putting up stickers everywhere," he said. "I myself have put up hundreds of them."

He took from his coat pocket a printed slip, gummed on one side, and told Sam that he had been putting them on walls and telegraph poles about town. The thing was vilely written. "Down with the dirty scabs" was the heading in bold, black letters across the top.

Sam was shocked at the vileness of the caption and at the crude brutality of the text printed on the slip.

"Do you call women workers names like that?" he asked.

"They have taken our work from us," the Jewish girl answered simply and began again, telling the story of her sister strikers and of what the low wage had meant to them and to their families. "To me it does not so much matter; I have a brother who works in a clothing store and he can support me, but many of the women in our union have only their wage here with which to feed their families."

Sam's mind began working on the problem.

"Here," he declared, "is something definite to do, a battle in which I will pit myself against this employer for the sake of these women."

He put away from him his experience in the Illinois town, telling himself that the young woman walking beside him would have a sense of honour unknown to the red-haired young workman who had sold him out to Bill and Ed.

"I failed with my money," he thought, "now I will try to help these girls with my energy."

Turning to the Jewish girl he made a quick decision.

"I will help you get your places back," he said.

Leaving the girls he went across the street to a barber shop where he could watch the entrance to the factory. He wanted to think out a method of procedure and wanted also to look at the girl strikebreakers as they came to work. After a time several girls came along the street and turned in at the stairway. The flashily dressed Hebrew with the cigar still in his mouth was again by the stairway entrance. The three pickets running forward accosted the file of girls going up the stairs, one of whom, a young American girl with yellow hair, turned and shouted something over her shoulder. The man called Frank shouted back and the Hebrew took the cigar out of his mouth and laughed heartily. Sam filled and lighted his pipe, a dozen plans for helping the striking girls running through his mind.

During the morning he went into the grocery store on the corner, a saloon in the neighbourhood, and returned to the barber shop talking to men of the strike. He ate his lunch alone, still thinking of the three girls patiently walking up and down before the stairway. Their ceaseless walking seemed to him a useless waste of energy.

"They should be doing something more definite," he thought.

After lunch he joined the soft-eyed Jewish girl and together they walked along the street talking of the strike.

"You cannot win this strike by just calling nasty names," he said. "I do not like that 'dirty scab' sticker Frank had in his pocket. It cannot help you and only antagonises the girls who have taken your places. Here in this part of town the people want to see you win. I have talked to the men who come into the saloon and the barber shop across the street and you already have their sympathy. You want to get the sympathy of the girls who have taken your places. Calling them dirty scabs only makes martyrs of them. Did the yellow-haired girl call you a name this morning?"

The Jewish girl looked at Sam and laughed bitterly.

"Rather; she called me a loud-mouthed street walker."

They continued their walk along the street, across the railroad track and a bridge, and into a quiet residence street. Carriages stood at the curb before the houses, and pointing to these and to the well-kept houses Sam said, "Men have bought these things for their women."

A shadow fell across the girl's face.

"I suppose all of us want what these women have," she answered. "We do not really want to fight and to stand on our own feet, not when we know the world. What a woman really wants is a man," she added shortly.

Sam began talking and told her of a plan that had come into his mind. He had remembered how Jack Prince and Morrison used to talk about the appeal of the direct personal letter and how effectively it was used by mail order houses.

"We will have a mail order strike here," he said and went on to lay before her the details of his plan. He proposed that she, Frank, and some others of the striking girls, should go about town getting the names and the mail addresses of the girl strikebreakers.

"Get also the names of the keepers of the boarding houses at which these girls live and the names of the men and women who live in the same houses," he suggested. "Then you get the striking girls and women together and have them tell me their stories. We will write letters day after day to the girl strikebreakers, to the women who keep the boarding houses, and to the people who live in the houses and sit at table with them. We won't call names. We will tell the story of what being beaten in this fight means to the women in your union, tell it simply and truthfully as you told it to me this morning."

"It will cost such a lot," said the Jewish girl, shaking her head.

Sam took a roll of bills from his pocket and showed it to her.

"I will pay," he said.

"Why?" she asked, looking at him sharply.

"Because I am a man wanting work just as you want work," he replied, and then went on hurriedly, "It is a long story. I am a rich man wandering about the world seeking Truth. I will not want that known. Take me for granted. You won't be sorry."

Within an hour he had engaged a large room, paying a month's rent in advance, and into the room chairs and table and typewriters had been brought. He put an advertisement in the evening paper for girl stenographers, and a printer, hurried by a promise of extra pay, ran out for him several thousand letter heads across the top of which in bold, black type ran the words, "The Girl Strikers."

That night Sam held, in the room he had engaged, a meeting of the girl strikers, explaining to them his plan and offering to pay all expenses of the fight he proposed to make for them. They clapped their hands and shouted approvingly, and Sam began laying out his campaign.

One of the girls he told off to stand in front of the factory morning and evening.

"I will have other help for you there," he said. "Before you go home to- night there will be a printer here with a bundle of pamphlets I am having printed for you."

Advised by the soft-eyed Jewish girl, he told off others to get additional names for the mailing list he wanted, getting many important ones from girls in the room. Six of the girls he asked to come in the morning to help him with addressing and mailing letters. The Jewish girl he told to take charge of the girls at work in the room—on the morrow to become also an office—and to superintend getting the names.

Frank rose at the back of the room.

"Who are you anyway?" he asked.

"A man with money and the ability to win this strike," Sam told him.

"What are you doing it for?" demanded Frank.

The Jewish girl sprang to her feet.

"Because he believes in these women and wants to help," she explained.

"Rot," said Frank, going out at the door.

It was snowing when the meeting ended, and Sam and the Jewish girl finished their talk in the hallway leading to her room.

"I don't know what Harrigan, the union leader from Pittsburgh, will say to this," she told him. "He appointed Frank to lead and direct the strike here. He doesn't like interference and he may not like your plan. But we working women need men, men like you who can plan and do things. There are too many men living on us. We need men who will work for all of us as the men work for the women in the carriages and automobiles." She laughed and put out a hand to him. "See what you have got yourself into? I want you to be a husband to our entire union."

The next morning four girl stenographers went to work in Sam's strike headquarters, and he wrote his first strike letter, a letter telling the story of a striking girl named Hadaway, whose young brother was sick with tuberculosis. Sam did not put any flourishes in the letter; he felt that he did not need to. He thought that with twenty or thirty such letters, each telling briefly and truthfully the story of one of the striking girls, he should be able to show one American town how its other half lived. He gave the letter to the four girl stenographers with the mailing list he already had and started them writing it to each of the names.

At eight o'clock a man came in to install a telephone and girl strikers began bringing in new names for the mailing list. At nine o'clock three more stenographers appeared and were put to work, and girls who had been in began sending more names over the 'phone. The Jewish girl walked up and down, giving orders, making suggestions. From time to time she ran to Sam's desk and suggested other sources of names for the mailing list. Sam thought that if the other working girls were timid and embarrassed before him this one was not. She was like a general on the field of battle. Her soft brown eyes glowed, her mind worked rapidly, and her voice had a ring in it. At her suggestion Sam gave the girls at the typewriters lists bearing the names of town officials, bankers and prominent business men, and the wives of all these, also presidents of various women's clubs, society women, and charitable organizations. She called reporters from the town's two daily papers and had them interview Sam, and at her suggestion he gave them copies of the Hadaway girl letter to print.

"Print it," he said, "and if you cannot use it as news, make it an advertisement and bring the bill to me."

At eleven o'clock Frank came into the room bringing a tall Irishman, with sunken cheeks, black, unclean teeth, and an overcoat too small for him. Leaving him standing by the door, Frank walked across the room to Sam.

"Come to lunch with us," he said. He jerked his thumb over his shoulder toward the tall Irishman. "I picked him up," he said. "Best brain that's been in town for years. He's a wonder. Used to be a Catholic priest. He doesn't believe in God or love or anything. Come on out and hear him talk. He's great."

Sam shook his head.

"I am too busy. There is work to be done here. We are going to win this strike."

Frank looked at him doubtfully and then about the room at the busy girls.

"I don't know what Harrigan will think of all this," he said. "He doesn't like interferences. I never do anything without writing him. I wrote and told him what you were doing here. I had to, you know. I'm responsible to headquarters."

In the afternoon the Hebrew owner of the shirtwaist factory came in to strike headquarters and, walking through the room took off his hat and sat down by Sam's desk.

"What do you want here?" he asked. "The newspaper boys told me of what you had planned to do. What's your game?"

"I want to whip you," Sam answered quietly, "to whip you good. You might as well get into line. You are going to lose this strike."

"I'm only one," said the Hebrew. "There is an association of us manufacturers of shirtwaists. We are all in this. We all have a strike on our hands. What will you gain if you do beat me here? I'm only a little fellow after all."

Sam laughed and picking up his pen began writing.

"You are unlucky," he said. "I just happened to take hold here. When I have you beaten I will go on and beat the others. There is more money back of me than back of you all, and I am going to beat every one of you."

The next morning a crowd stood before the stairway leading to the factory when the strikebreaking girls came to work. The letters and the newspaper interview had been effective and more than half the strikebreakers did not appear. The others hurried along the street and turned in at the stairway without looking at the crowd. The girl, told off by Sam, stood on the sidewalk passing out pamphlets to the strikebreakers. The pamphlets were headed, "The Story of Ten Girls," and told briefly and pointedly the stories of ten striking girls and what the loss of the strike meant to them and to their families.

After a while there drove up two carriages and a large automobile, and out of the automobile climbed a well-dressed woman who took a bundle of the pamphlets from the girl picket and began passing them about among the people. Two policemen who stood in front of the crowd took off their helmets and accompanied her. The crowd cheered. Frank came hurrying across the street to where Sam stood in front of the barber shop and slapped him on the back.

"You're a wonder," he said.

Sam hurried back to the room and prepared the second letter for the mailing list. Two more stenographers had come to work. He had to send out for more machines. A reporter for the town's evening paper ran up the stairway.

"Who are you?" he asked. "The town wants to know."

From his pocket he took a telegram from a Pittsburgh daily.

"What about mail-order strike plan? Give name and story new strike leader there."

At ten o'clock Frank returned.

"There's a wire from Harrigan," he said. "He's coming here. He wants a mass meeting of the girls for to-night. I've got to get them together. We'll meet here in this room."

In the room the work went on. The list of names for the mailing had doubled. The picket at the shirtwaist factory reported that three more of the strikebreakers had left the plant. The Jewish girl was excited. She went hurrying about the room, her eyes glowing.

"It's great," she said. "The plan is working. The whole town is aroused and for us. We'll win in another twenty-four hours."

And then at seven o'clock that night Harrigan came into the room where Sam sat with the assembled girls, bolting the door behind him. He was a short, strongly built man with blue eyes and red hair. He walked about the room in silence, followed by Frank. Suddenly he stopped and, picking up one of the typewriting machines rented by Sam for the letter writing, raised it above his head and sent it smashing to the floor.

"A hell of a strike leader," he roared. "Look at this. Scab machines!

"Scab stenographers!" he said through his teeth. "Scab printing! Scab everything!"

Picking up a bundle of the letterheads, he tore them across, and walking to the front of the room, shook his fist before Sam's face.

"Scab leader!" he shouted, turning and facing the girls.

The soft-eyed Jewish girl sprang to her feet.

"He's winning for us," she said.

Harrigan walked toward her threateningly.

"Better lose than win a scab victory," he bellowed.

"Who are you anyway? What grafter sent you here?" he demanded, turning to Sam.

He launched into a speech. "I have been watching this fellow, I know him. He has a scheme to break down the union and is being paid by the capitalists."

Sam waited to hear no more. Getting up he pulled on his canvas jacket and started for the door. He saw that already he had involved himself in a dozen violations of the unionist code and the idea of trying to convince Harrigan of his disinterestedness did not occur to him.

"Do not mind me," he said, "I am going."

He walked between the rows of frightened, white-faced girls and unbolted the door, the Jewish girl following. At the head of the stairway leading to the street he stopped and pointed back into the room.

"Go back," he said, handing her a roll of bills. "Carry on the work if you can. Get other machines and new printing. I will help you in secret."

Turning he ran down the stairs, hurried through the curious crowd standing at the foot, and walked rapidly along in front of the lighted stores. A cold rain, half snow, was falling. Beside him walked a young man with a brown pointed beard, one of the newspaper reporters who had interviewed him the day before.

"Did Harrigan trim you?" asked the young man, and then added, laughing, "He told us he intended to throw you down stairs."

Sam walked on in silence, filled with wrath. He turned into a side street and stopped when his companion put a hand upon his arm.

"This is our dump," said the young man, pointing to a long low frame building facing the side street. "Come in and let us have your story. It should be a good one."

Inside the newspaper office another young man sat with his head lying on a flat-top desk. He was clad in a strikingly flashy plaid coat, had a little wizened, good-natured face and seemed to have been drinking. The young man with the beard explained Sam's identity, taking the sleeping man by the shoulder and shaking him vigorously.

"Wake up, Skipper! There's a good story here!" he shouted. "The union has thrown out the mail-order strike leader!"

The Skipper got to his feet and began shaking his head.

"Of course, of course, Old Top, they would throw you out. You've got some brains. No man with brains can lead a strike. It's against the laws of Nature. Something was bound to hit you. Did Roughneck come out from Pittsburgh?" he asked, turning to the young man of the brown beard.

Then reaching above his head and taking a cap that matched his plaid coat from a nail on the wall, he winked at Sam. "Come on, Old Top. I've got to get a drink."

The two men went through a side door and down a dark alley, going in at the back door of a saloon. Mud lay deep in the alley and The Skipper sloshed through it, splattering Sam's clothes and face. In the saloon at a table facing Sam, with a bottle of French wine between them, he began explaining.

"I've a note coming due at the bank in the morning and no money to pay it," he said. "When I have a note coming due I always have no money and I always get drunk. Then next morning I pay the note. I don't know how I do it, but I always come out all right. It's a system—Now about this strike." He plunged into a discussion of the strike while men came in and out, laughing and drinking. At ten o'clock the proprietor locked the front door, drew the curtain, and coming to the back of the room sat down at the table with Sam and The Skipper, bringing another bottle of the French wine from which the two men continued drinking.

"That man from Pittsburgh busted up your place, eh?" he said, turning to Sam. "A man came in here to-night and told me. He sent for the typewriter people and made them take away the machines."

When they were ready to leave, Sam took money from his pocket and offered to pay for the bottle of French wine ordered by The Skipper, who arose and stood unsteadily on his feet.

"Do you mean to insult me?" he demanded indignantly, throwing a twenty- dollar bill on the table. The proprietor gave him back only fourteen dollars.

"I might as well wipe off the slate while you're flush," he observed, winking at Sam.

The Skipper sat down again, taking a pencil and pad of paper from his pocket, and throwing them on the table.

"I want an editorial on the strike for the Old Rag," he said to Sam. "Do one for me. Do something strong. Get a punch into it. I want to talk to my friend here."

Putting the pad of paper on the table Sam began writing his newspaper editorial. His head seemed wonderfully clear, his command of words unusually good. He called the attention of the public to the situation, the struggles of the striking girls and the intelligent fight they had been making to win a just cause, following this with paragraphs pointing out how the effectiveness of the work done had been annulled by the position taken by the labour and socialist leaders.

"These fellows at bottom care nothing for results," he wrote. "They are not thinking of the unemployed women with families to support, they are thinking only of themselves and their puny leadership which they fear is threatened. Now we shall have the usual exhibition of all the old things, struggle, and hatred and defeat."

When he had finished The Skipper and Sam went back through the alley to the newspaper office. The Skipper sloshed again through the mud and carried in his hand a bottle of red gin. At his desk he took the editorial from Sam's hands and read it.

"Perfect! Perfect to the thousandth part of an inch, Old Top," he said, pounding Sam on the shoulder. "Just what the Old Rag wanted to say about the strike." Then climbing upon the desk and putting the plaid coat under his head he went peacefully to sleep, and Sam, sitting beside the desk in a shaky office chair, slept also. At daybreak a black man with a broom in his hand woke them, and going into a long low room filled with presses The Skipper put his head under a water tap and came back waving a soiled towel and with water dripping from his hair.

"Now for the day and the labours thereof," he said, grinning at Sam and taking a long drink out of the gin bottle.

After breakfast he and Sam took up their stand in front of the barber shop opposite the stairway leading to the shirtwaist factory. Sam's girl with the pamphlets was gone as was also the soft-eyed Jewish girl, and in their places Frank and the Pittsburgh leader named Harrigan walked up and down. Again carriages and automobiles stood by the curb, and again a well- dressed woman got out of a machine and went toward three striking girls approaching along the sidewalk. The woman was met by Harrigan, shaking his fist and shouting, and getting back into the machine she drove off. From the stairway the flashily-dressed Hebrew looked at the crowd and laughed.

"Where is the new strike leader—the mail-order strike leader?" he called to Frank.

With the words, a working man with a dinner pail on his arm ran out of the crowd and knocked the Jew back into the stairway.

"Punch him! Punch the dirty scab leader!" yelled Frank, dancing up and down on the sidewalk.

Two policemen running forward began leading the workingman up the street, his dinner pail still clutched in one hand.

"I know something," The Skipper shouted, pounding Sam on the shoulder. "I know who will sign that note with me. The woman Harrigan drove back into her machine is the richest woman in town. I will show her your editorial. She will think I wrote it and it will get her. You'll see." He ran off up the street, shouting back over his shoulder, "Come over to the dump, I want to see you again."

Sam returned to the newspaper office and sat down waiting for The Skipper who, after a time, came in, took off his coat and began writing furiously. From time to time he took long drinks out of the bottle of red gin, and after silently offering it to Sam, continued reeling off sheet after sheet of loosely-written matter.

"I got her to sign the note," he called over his shoulder to Sam. "She was furious at Harrigan and when I told her we were going to attack him and defend you she fell for it quick. I won out by following my system. I always get drunk and it always wins."

At ten o'clock the newspaper office was in a ferment. The little man with the brown pointed beard, and another, kept running to The Skipper asking advice, laying typewritten sheets before him, talking as he wrote.

"Give me a lead. I want one more front page lead," The Skipper kept bawling at them, working like mad.

At ten thirty the door opened and Harrigan, accompanied by Frank, came in. Seeing Sam they stopped, looking at him uncertainly, and at the man at work at the desk.

"Well, speak up. This is no ladies' reception room. What do you fellows want?" snapped The Skipper, glaring at them.

Frank, coming forward, laid a typewritten sheet on the desk, which the newspaper man read hurriedly.

"Will you use it?" asked Frank.

The Skipper laughed.

"Wouldn't change a word of it," he shouted. "Sure I'll use it. It's what I wanted to make my point. You fellows watch me."

Frank and Harrigan went out and The Skipper, rushing to the door, began yelling into the room beyond.

"Hey, you Shorty and Tom, I've got that last lead."

Coming back to his desk he began writing again, grinning as he worked. To Sam he handed the typewritten sheet prepared by Frank.

"Dastardly attempt to win the cause of the working girls by dirty scab leaders and butter-fingered capitalist class," it began, and after this followed a wild jumble of words, words without meaning, sentences without point in which Sam was called a mealy-mouthed mail-order musser and The Skipper was mentioned incidentally as a pusillanimous ink slinger.

"I'll run the stuff and comment on it," declared The Skipper, handing Sam what he had written. It was an editorial inviting the public to read the article prepared for publication by the strike leaders and sympathising with the striking girls that their cause had to be lost because of the incompetence and lack of intelligence of their leaders.

"Hurrah for Roughhouse, the brave man who leads working girls to defeat in order that he may retain leadership and drive intelligent effort out of the cause of labour," wrote The Skipper.

Sam looked at the sheets and out of the window where a snow storm raged. It seemed to him that a crime was being done and he was sick and disgusted at his own inability to stop it. The Skipper lighted a short black pipe and took his cap from a nail on the wall.

"I'm the smoothest little newspaper thing in town and some financier as well," he declared. "Let's go have a drink."

After the drink Sam walked through the town toward the country. At the edge of town where the houses became scattered and the road started to drop away into a deep valley some one helloed behind him. Turning, he saw the soft-eyed Jewish girl running along a path beside the road.

"Where are you going?" he asked, stopping to lean against a board fence, the snow falling upon his face.

"I'm going with you," said the girl. "You're the best and the strongest man I've ever seen and I'm not going to let you get away. If you've got a wife it don't matter. She isn't what she should be or you wouldn't be walking about the country alone. Harrigan and Frank say you're crazy, but I know better. I am going with you and I'm going to help you find what you want."

Sam wondered. She took a roll of bills from a pocket in her dress and gave it to him.

"I spent three hundred and fourteen dollars," she said.

They stood looking at each other. She put out a hand and laid it on his arm. Her eyes, soft and now glowing with eager light looked into his. Her round breasts rose and fell.

"Anywhere you say. I'll be your servant if you ask it of me."

A wave of hot desire ran through Sam followed by a quick reaction. He thought of his months of weary seeking and his universal failure.

"You are going back to town if I have to drive you there with stones," he told her, and turning ran down the valley leaving her standing by the board fence, her head buried in her arms.



CHAPTER V

One crisp winter evening Sam found himself on a busy street corner in Rochester, N.Y., watching from a doorway the crowds of people hurrying or loitering past him. He stood in a doorway near a corner that seemed to be a public meeting place and from all sides came men and women who met at the corner, stood for a moment in talk, and then went away together. Sam found himself beginning to wonder about the meetings. In the year since he had walked out of the Chicago office his mind had grown more and more reflective. Little things—a smile on the lips of an ill-clad old man mumbling and hurrying past him on the street, or the flutter of a child's hand from the doorway of a farmhouse—had furnished him food for hours of thought. Now he watched with interest the little incidents; the nods, the hand clasps, the hurried stealthy glances around of the men and women who met for a moment at the corner. On the sidewalk near his doorway several middle-aged men, evidently from a large hotel around the corner, were eyeing, with unpleasant, hungry, furtive eyes the women in the crowd.

A large blond woman stepped into the doorway beside Sam. "Waiting for some one?" she asked, smiling and looking steadily at him, with the harried, uncertain, hungry light he had seen in the eyes of the middle-aged men upon the sidewalk.

"What are you doing here with your husband at work?" he ventured.

She looked startled and then laughed.

"Why don't you hit me with your fist if you want to jolt me like that?" she demanded, adding, "I don't know who you are, but whoever you are I want to tell you that I've quit my husband."

"Why?" asked Sam.

She laughed again and stepping over looked at him closely.

"I guess you're bluffing," she said. "I don't believe you know Alf at all. And I'm glad you don't. I've quit Alf, but he would raise Cain just the same, if he saw me out here hustling."

Sam stepped out of the doorway and walked down a side street past a lighted theatre. Along the street women raised their eyes to him and beyond the theatre, a young girl, brushing against him, muttered, "Hello, Sport!"

Sam wanted to get away from the unhealthy, hungry look he had seen in the eyes of the men and women. His mind began working on this side of the lives of great numbers of people in the cities—of the men and women on the street corner, of the woman who from the security of a safe marriage had once thrown a challenge into his eyes as they sat together in the theatre, and of the thousand little incidents in the lives of all modern city men and women. He wondered how much that eager, aching hunger stood in the way of men's getting hold of life and living it earnestly and purposefully, as he wanted to live it, and as he felt all men and women wanted at bottom to live it. When he was a boy in Caxton he was more than once startled by the flashes of brutality and coarseness in the speech and actions of kindly, well-meaning men; now as he walked in the streets of the city he thought that he had got past being startled. "It is a quality of our lives," he decided. "American men and women have not learned to be clean and noble and natural, like their forests and their wide, clean plains."

He thought of what he had heard of London, and of Paris, and of other cities of the old world; and following an impulse acquired through his lonely wanderings, began talking to himself.

"We are no finer nor cleaner than these," he said, "and we sprang from the big clean new land through which I have been walking all these months. Will mankind always go on with that old aching, queerly expressed hunger in its blood, and with that look in its eyes? Will it never shrive itself and understand itself, and turn fiercely and energetically toward the building of a bigger and cleaner race of men?"

"It won't unless you help," came the answer from some hidden part of him.

Sam fell to thinking of the men who write, and of those who teach, and he wondered why they did not, all of them, talk more thoughtfully of vice, and why they so often spent their talents and their energies in futile attacks upon some phase of life, and ended their efforts toward human betterment by joining or promoting a temperance league, or stopping the playing of baseball on Sunday.

As a matter of fact were not many writers and reformers unconsciously in league with the procurer, in that they treated vice and profligacy as something, at bottom, charming? He himself had seen none of this vague charm.

"For me," he reflected, "there have been no Francois Villons or Sapphos in the tenderloins of American cities. There have been instead only heart- breaking disease and ill health and poverty, and hard brutal faces and torn, greasy finery."

He thought of men like Zola who saw this side of life clearly and how he, as a young fellow in the city, had read the man at Janet Eberly's suggestion and had been helped by him—helped and frightened and made to see. And then there rose before him the leering face of a keeper of a second-hand book store in Cleveland who some weeks before had pushed across the counter to him a paper-covered copy of "Nana's Brother," saying with a smirk, "That's some sporty stuff." And he wondered what he should have thought had he bought the book to feed the imagination the bookseller's comment was intended to arouse.

In the small towns through which Sam walked and in the small town in which he grew to manhood vice was openly crude and masculine. It went to sleep sprawling across a dirty beer-soaked table in Art Sherman's saloon in Piety Hollow, and the newsboy passed it without comment, regretting that it slept and that it had no money with which to buy papers.

"Dissipation and vice get into the life of youth," he thought, coming to a street corner where young men played pool and smoked cigarettes in a dingy poolroom, and turned back toward the heart of the city. "It gets into all modern life. The farmer boy coming up to the city to work hears lewd stories in the smoking car of the train, and the travelling men from the cities tell tales of the city streets to the group about the stove in village stores."

Sam did not quarrel with the fact that youth touched vice. Such things were a part of the world that men and women had made for their sons and daughters to live in, and that night as he wandered in the streets of Rochester he thought that he would like all youth to know, if they could but know, truth. His heart was bitter at the thought of men throwing the glamour of romance over the sordid, ugly things he had been seeing in that city and in every city he had known.

Past him in a street lined with small frame houses stumbled a man far gone in drink, by whose side walked a boy, and Sam's mind leaped back to those first years he had spent in the city and of the staggering old man he had left behind him in Caxton.

"You would think no man better armed against vice and dissipation than that painter's son of Caxton," he reminded himself, "and yet he embraced vice. He found, as all young men find, that there is much misleading talk and writing on the subject. The business men he knew did not part with able assistance because it did not sign the pledge. Ability was too rare a thing and too independent to sign pledges, and the lips-that-touch-liquor- shall-never-touch-mine sentiment among women was reserved for the lips that did not invite."

He began reviewing incidents of carouses he had been on with business men of his acquaintance, of a policeman knocked into a street and of himself, quiet and ably climbing upon tables to make speeches and to shout the innermost secrets of his heart to drunken hangers-on in Chicago barrooms. Normally he had not been a good mixer. He had been one to keep himself to himself. But on these carouses he let himself go, and got a reputation for daring audacity by slapping men on the back and singing songs with them. A glowing cordiality had pervaded him and for a time he had really believed there was such a thing as high flying vice that glistens in the sun.

Now stumbling past lighted saloons, wandering unknown in a city's streets, he knew better. All vice was unclean, unhealthy.

He remembered a hotel in which he had once slept, a hotel that admitted questionable couples. Its halls had become dingy; its windows remained unopened; dirt gathered in the corners; the attendants shuffled as they walked, and leered into the faces of creeping couples; the curtains at the windows were torn and discoloured; strange snarling oaths, screams, and cries jarred the tense nerves; peace and cleanliness had fled the place; men hurried through the halls with hats drawn down over their faces; sunlight and fresh air and cheerful, whistling bellboys were locked out.

He thought of the weary, restless walks taken by the young men from farms and country towns in the streets of the cities; young men believers in the golden vice. Hands beckoned to them from doorways, and women of the town laughed at their awkwardness. In Chicago he had walked in that way. He also had been seeking, seeking the romantic, impossible mistress that lurked at the bottom of men's tales of the submerged world. He wanted his golden girl. He was like the naive German lad in the South Water Street warehouses who had once said to him—he was a frugal soul—"I would like to find a nice-looking girl who is quiet and modest and who will be my mistress and not charge anything."

Sam had not found his golden girl, and now he knew she did not exist. He had not seen the places called by the preachers the palaces of sin, and now he knew there were no such places. He wondered why youth could not be made to understand that sin is foul and that immorality reeks of vulgarity. Why could not they be told plainly that there are no housecleaning days in the tenderloin?

During his married life men had come to the house who discussed this matter. One of them, he remembered, had maintained stoutly that the scarlet sisterhood was a necessity of modern life and that ordinary decent social life could not go on without it. Often during the past year Sam had thought of the man's talk and his brain had reeled before the thought. In towns and on country roads he had seen troops of little girls come laughing and shouting out of school houses, and had wondered which of them would be chosen for that service to mankind; and now, in his hour of depression, he wished that the man who had talked at his dinner table might be made to walk with him and to share with him his thoughts.

Turning again into a lighted busy thoroughfare of the city, Sam continued his study of the faces in the crowds. To do this quieted and soothed his mind. He began to feel a weariness in his legs and thought with gratitude that he should have a night of good sleep. The sea of faces rolling up to him under the lights filled him with peace. "There is so much of life," he thought, "it must come to some end."

Looking intently at the faces, the dull faces and the bright faces, the faces drawn out of shape and with eyes nearly meeting above the nose, the faces with long, heavy sensual jaws, and the empty, soft faces on which the scalding finger of thought had left no mark, his fingers ached to get a pencil in his hand, or to spread the faces upon canvas in enduring pigments, to hold them up before the world and to be able to say, "Here are the faces you, by your lives, have made for yourselves and for your children."

In the lobby of a tall office building, where he stopped at a little cigar counter to get fresh tobacco for his pipe, he looked so fixedly at a woman clad in long soft furs, that in alarm she hurried out to her machine to wait for her escort, who had evidently gone up the elevator.

Once more in the street, Sam shuddered at the thought of the hands that had laboured that the soft cheeks and the untroubled eyes of this one woman might be. Into his mind came the face and figure of a little Canadian nurse who had once cared for him through an illness—her quick, deft fingers and her muscular little arms. "Another such as she," he muttered, "has been at work upon the face and body of this gentlewoman; a hunter has gone into the white silence of the north to bring out the warm furs that adorn her; for her there has been a tragedy—a shot, and red blood upon the snow, and a struggling beast waving its little claws in the air; for her a woman has worked through the morning, bathing her white limbs, her cheeks, her hair."

For this gentlewoman also there had been a man apportioned, a man like himself, who had cheated and lied and gone through the years in pursuit of the dollars to pay all of the others, a man of power, a man who could achieve, could accomplish. Again he felt within him a yearning for the power of the artist, the power not only to see the meaning of the faces in the street, but to reproduce what he saw, to get with subtle fingers the story of the achievement of mankind into a face hanging upon a wall.

In other days, in Caxton, listening to Telfer's talk, and in Chicago and New York with Sue, Sam had tried to get an inkling of the passion of the artist; now walking and looking at the faces rolling past him on the long street he thought that he did understand.

Once when he was new in the city he had, for some months, carried on an affair with a woman, the daughter of a cattle farmer from Iowa. Now her face filled his vision. How rugged it was, how filled with the message of the ground underfoot; the thick lips, the dull eyes, the strong, bullet- like head, how like the cattle her father had bought and sold. He remembered the little room in Chicago where he had his first love passage with this woman. How frank and wholesome it had seemed. How eagerly both man and woman had rushed at evening to the meeting place. How her strong hands had clasped him. The face of the woman in the motor by the office building danced before his eyes, the face so peaceful, so free from the marks of human passion, and he wondered what daughter of a cattle raiser had taken the passion out of the man who paid for the beauty of that face.

On a side street, near the lighted front of a cheap theatre, a woman, standing alone and half concealed in the doorway of a church, called softly, and turning he went to her.

"I am not a customer," he said, looking at her thin face and bony hands, "but if you care to come with me I will stand a good dinner. I am getting hungry and do not like eating alone. I want some one to talk to me so that I won't get to thinking."

"You're a queer bird," said the woman, taking his arm. "What have you done that you don't want to think?"

Sam said nothing.

"There's a place over there," she said, pointing to the lighted front of a cheap restaurant with soiled curtains at the windows.

Sam kept on walking.

"If you do not mind," he said, "I will pick the place. I want to buy a good dinner. I want a place with clean linen on the table and a good cook in the kitchen."

They stopped at a corner to talk of the dinner, and at her suggestion he waited at a near-by drug store while she went to her room. As he waited he went to the telephone and ordered the dinner and a taxicab. When she returned she had on a clean shirtwaist and had combed her hair. Sam thought he caught the odour of benzine, and guessed she had been at work on the spots on her worn jacket. She seemed surprised to find him still waiting.

"I thought maybe it was a stall," she said.

They drove in silence to a place Sam had in mind, a road-house with clean washed floors, painted walls, and open fires in the private dining-rooms. Sam had been there several times during the month, and the food had been well cooked.

They ate in silence. Sam had no curiosity to hear her talk of herself, and she seemed to have no knack of casual conversation. He was not studying her, but had brought her as he had said, because of his loneliness, and because her thin, tired face and frail body, looking out from the darkness by the church door, had made an appeal.

She had, he thought, a look of hard chastity, like one whipped but not defeated. Her cheeks were thin and covered with freckles, like a boy's. Her teeth were broken and in bad repair, though clean, and her hands had the worn, hardly-used look of his own mother's hands. Now that she sat before him in the restaurant, in some vague way she resembled his mother.

After dinner he sat smoking his cigar and looking at the fire. The woman of the streets leaned across the table and touched him on the arm.

"Are you going to take me anywhere after this—after we leave here?" she said.

"I am going to take you to the door of your room, that's all."

"I'm glad," she said; "it's a long time since I've had an evening like this. It makes me feel clean."

For a time they sat in silence and then Sam began talking of his home town in Iowa, letting himself go and expressing the thoughts that came into his mind. He told her of his mother and of Mary Underwood and she in turn told of her town and of her life. She had some difficulty about hearing which made conversation trying. Words and sentences had to be repeated to her and after a time Sam smoked and looked at the fire, letting her talk. Her father had been a captain of a small steamboat plying up and down Long Island Sound and her mother a careful, shrewd woman and a good housekeeper. They had lived in a Rhode Island village and had a garden back of their house. The captain had not married until he was forty-five and had died when the girl was eighteen, the mother dying a year later.

The girl had not been much known in the Rhode Island village, being shy and reticent. She had kept the house clean and helped the captain in the garden. When her parents were dead she had found herself alone with thirty-seven hundred dollars in the bank and the little home, and had married a young man who was a clerk in a railroad office, and sold the house to move to Kansas City. The big flat country frightened her. Her life there had been unsuccessful. She had been lonely for the hills and the water of her New England village, and she was, by nature, undemonstrative and unemotional, so that she did not get much hold of her husband. He had undoubtedly married her for the little hoard and, by various devices, began getting it from her. A son had been born, for a time her health broke badly, and she discovered through an accident that her husband was spending her money in dissipation among the women of the town.

"There wasn't any use wasting words when I found he didn't care for me or for the baby and wouldn't support us, so I left him," she said in a level, businesslike way.

When she came to count up, after she had got clear of her husband and had taken a course in stenography, there was one thousand dollars of her savings left and she felt pretty safe. She took a position and went to work, feeling well satisfied and happy. And then came the trouble with her hearing. She began to lose places and finally had to be content with a small salary, earned by copying form letters for a mail order medicine man. The boy she put out with a capable German woman, the wife of a gardener. She paid four dollars a week for him and there was clothing to be bought for herself and the boy. Her wage from the medicine man was seven dollars a week.

"And so," she said, "I began going on the street. I knew no one and there was nothing else to do. I couldn't do that in the town where the boy lived, so I came away. I've gone from city to city, working mostly for patent medicine men and filling out my income by what I earned in the streets. I'm not naturally a woman who cares about men and not many of them care about me. I don't like to have them touch me with their hands. I can't drink as most of the girls do; it sickens me. I want to be left alone. Perhaps I shouldn't have married. Not that I minded my husband. We got along very well until I had to stop giving him money. When I found where it was going it opened my eyes. I felt that I had to have at least a thousand dollars for the boy in case anything happened to me. When I found there wasn't anything to do but just go on the streets, I went. I tried doing other work, but hadn't the strength, and when it came to the test I cared more about the boy than I did about myself—any woman would. I thought he was of more importance than what I wanted.

"It hasn't been easy for me. Sometimes when I have got a man to go with me I walk along the street praying that I won't shudder and draw away when he touches me with his hands. I know that if I do he will go away and I won't get any money.

"And then they talk and lie about themselves. I've had them try to work off bad money and worthless jewelry on me. Sometimes they try to make love to me and then steal back the money they have given me. That's the hard part, the lying and the pretence. All day I write the same lies over and over for the patent-medicine men and then at night I listen to these others lying to me."

She stopped talking and leaning over put her cheek down on her hand and sat looking into the fire.

"My mother," she began again, "didn't always wear a clean dress. She couldn't. She was always down on her knees scrubbing around the floor or out in the garden pulling weeds. But she hated dirt. If her dress was dirty her underwear was clean and so was her body. She taught me to be that way and I wanted to be. It came naturally. But I'm losing it all. All evening I have been sitting here with you thinking that my underwear isn't clean. Most of the time I don't care. Being clean doesn't go with what I am doing. I have to keep trying to be flashy outside so that men will stop when they see me on the street. Sometimes when I have done well I don't go on the streets for three or four weeks. Then I clean up my room and bathe myself. My landlady lets me do my washing in the basement at night. I don't seem to care about cleanliness the weeks I am on the streets."

The little German orchestra began playing a lullaby, and a fat German waiter came in at the open door and put more wood on the fire. He stopped by the table and talked about the mud in the road outside. From another room came the silvery clink of glasses and the sound of laughing voices. The girl and Sam drifted back into talk of their home towns. Sam felt that he liked her very much and thought that if she had belonged to him he should have found a basis on which to live with her contentedly. She had a quality of honesty that he was always seeking in people.

As they drove back to the city she put a hand on his arm.

"I wouldn't mind about you," she said, looking at him frankly.

Sam laughed and patted her thin hand. "It's been a good evening," he said, "we'll go through with it as it stands."

"Thanks for that," she said, "and there is something else I want to tell you. Perhaps you will think it bad of me. Sometimes when I don't want to go on the streets I get down on my knees and pray for strength to go on gamely. Does it seem bad? We are a praying people, we New Englanders."

As he stood in the street Sam could hear her laboured asthmatic breathing as she climbed the stairs to her room. Half way up she stopped and waved her hand at him. The thing was awkwardly done and boyish. Sam had a feeling that he should like to get a gun and begin shooting citizens in the streets. He stood in the lighted city looking down the long deserted street and thought of Mike McCarthy in the jail at Caxton. Like Mike, he lifted up his voice in the night.

"Are you there, O God? Have you left your children here on the earth hurting each other? Do you put the seed of a million children in a man, and the planting of a forest in one tree, and permit men to wreck and hurt and destroy?"



CHAPTER VI

One morning, at the end of his second year of wandering, Sam got out of his bed in a cold little hotel in a mining village in West Virginia, looked at the miners, their lamps in their caps, going through the dimly lighted streets, ate a portion of leathery breakfast cakes, paid his bill at the hotel, and took a train for New York. He had definitely abandoned the idea of getting at what he wanted through wandering about the country and talking to chance acquaintances by the wayside and in villages, and had decided to return to a way of life more befitting his income.

He felt that he was not by nature a vagabond, and that the call of the wind and the sun and the brown road was not insistent in his blood. The spirit of Pan did not command him, and although there were certain spring mornings of his wandering days that were like mountain tops in his experience of life, mornings when some strong, sweet feeling ran through the trees, and the grass, and the body of the wanderer, and when the call of life seemed to come shouting and inviting down the wind, filling him with delight of the blood in his body and the thoughts in his brain, yet at bottom and in spite of these days of pure joy he was, after all, a man of the towns and the crowds. Caxton and South Water Street and LaSalle Street had all left their marks on him, and so, throwing his canvas jacket into a corner of the room in the West Virginia hotel, he returned to the haunts of his kind.

In New York he went to an uptown club where he owned a membership and into the grill where he found at breakfast an actor acquaintance named Jackson.

Sam dropped into a chair and looked about him. He remembered a visit he had made there some years before with Webster and Crofts and felt again the quiet elegance of the surroundings.

"Hello, Moneymaker," said Jackson, heartily. "Heard you had gone to a nunnery."

Sam laughed and began ordering a breakfast that made Jackson's eyes open with astonishment.

"You, Mr. Elegance, would not understand a man's spending month after month in the open air seeking a good body and an end in life and then suddenly changing his mind and coming back to a place like this," he observed.

Jackson laughed and lighted a cigarette.

"How little you know me," he said. "I would live my life in the open but that I am a mighty good actor and have just finished another long New York run. What are you going to do now that you are thin and brown? Will you go back to Morrison and Prince and money making?"

Sam shook his head and looked at the quiet elegance of the man before him. How satisfied and happy he looked.

"I am going to try living among the rich and the leisurely," he said.

"They are a rotten crew," Jackson assured him, "and I am taking a night train for Detroit. Come with me. We will talk things over."

On the train that night they got into talk with a broad-shouldered old man who told them of a hunting trip on which he was bound.

"I am going to sail from Seattle," he said, "and go everywhere and hunt everything. I am going to shoot the head off of every big animal kind of thing left in the world and then come back to New York and stay there until I die."

"I will go with you," said Sam, and in the morning left Jackson at Detroit and continued westward with his new acquaintance.

For months Sam travelled and shot with the old man, a vigorous, big- hearted old fellow who, having become wealthy through an early investment in stock of the Standard Oil Company, devoted his life to his lusty, primitive passion for shooting and killing. They went on lion hunts, elephant hunts and tiger hunts, and when on the west coast of Africa Sam took a boat for London, his companion walked up and down the beach smoking black cheroots and declaring the fun was only half over and that Sam was a fool to go.

After the year of the hunt royal Sam spent another year living the life of a gentleman of wealth and leisure in London, New York, and Paris. He went on automobile trips, fished and loafed along the shores of northern lakes, canoed through Canada with a writer of nature books, and sat about clubs and fashionable hotels listening to the talk of the men and women of that world.

Late one afternoon in the spring of the year he went to the village on the Hudson River where Sue had taken a house, and almost immediately saw her. For an hour he followed, watching her quick, active little figure as she walked through the village streets, and wondering what life had come to mean to her, but when, turning suddenly, she would have come face to face with him, he hurried down a side street and took a train to the city feeling that he could not face her empty-handed and ashamed after the years.

In the end he started drinking again, not moderately now, but steadily and almost continuously. One night in Detroit, with three young men from his hotel, he got drunk and was, for the first time since his parting with Sue, in the company of women. Four of them, met in some restaurant, got into an automobile with Sam and the three young men and rode about town laughing, waving bottles of wine in the air, and calling to passers-by in the street. They wound up in a diningroom in a place at the edge of town, where the party spent hours around a long table, drinking, and singing songs.

One of the girls sat on Sam's lap and put an arm about his neck.

"Give me some money, rich man," she said.

Sam looked at her closely.

"Who are you?" he asked.

She began explaining that she was a clerk in a downtown store and that she had a lover who drove a laundry wagon.

"I go on these bats to get money to buy good clothes," she said frankly, "but if Tim saw me here he would kill me."

Putting a bill into her hand Sam went downstairs and getting into a taxicab drove back to his hotel.

After that night he went frequently on carouses of this kind. He was in a kind of prolonged stupor of inaction, talked of trips abroad which he did not take, bought a huge farm in Virginia which he never visited, planned a return to business which he did not execute, and month after month continued to waste his days. He would get out of bed at noon and begin drinking steadily. As the afternoon passed he grew merry and talkative, calling men by their first names, slapping chance acquaintances on the back, playing pool or billiards with skilful young men intent upon gain. In the early summer he got in with a party of young men from New York and with them spent months in sheer idle waste of time. Together they drove high-powered automobiles on long trips, drank, quarrelled, and went on board a yacht to carouse, alone or with women. At times Sam would leave his companions and spend days riding through the country on fast trains, sitting for hours in silence looking out of the window at the passing country and wondering at his endurance of the life he led. For some months he carried with him a young man whom he called a secretary and paid a large salary for his ability to tell stories and sing clever songs, only to discharge him suddenly for telling a foul tale that reminded Sam of another tale told by the stoop-shouldered old man in the office of Ed's hotel in the Illinois town.

From being silent and taciturn, as during the months of his wanderings, Sam became morose and combative. Staying on and on in the empty, aimless way of life he had adopted he yet felt that there was for him a right way of living and wondered at his continued inability to find it. He lost his native energy, grew fat and coarse of body, was pleased for hours by little things, read no books, lay for hours in bed drunk and talking nonsense to himself, ran about the streets swearing vilely, grew habitually coarse in thought and speech, sought constantly a lower and more vulgar set of companions, was brutal and ugly with attendants about hotels and clubs where he lived, hated life, but ran like a coward to sanitariums and health resorts at the wagging of a doctor's head.



BOOK IV

CHAPTER I

One afternoon in early September Sam got on a westward-bound train intending to visit his sister on the farm near Caxton. For years he had heard nothing from Kate, but she had, he knew, two daughters, and he thought he would do something for them.

"I will put them on the Virginia farm and make a will leaving them my money," he thought. "Perhaps I shall be able to make them happy by setting them up in life and giving them beautiful clothes to wear."

At St. Louis he got off the train, thinking vaguely that he would see an attorney and make arrangements about the will, and for several days stayed about the Planters Hotel with a set of drinking companions he had picked up. One afternoon he began going from place to place drinking and gathering companions. An ugly light was in his eyes and he looked at men and women passing in the streets, feeling that he was in the midst of enemies, and that for him the peace, contentment, and good cheer that shone out of the eyes of others was beyond getting.

In the late afternoon, followed by a troop of roistering companions, he came out upon a street flanked with small, brick warehouses facing the river, where steamboats lay tied to floating docks.

"I want a boat to take me and my crowd for a cruise up and down the river," he announced, approaching the captain of one of the boats. "Take us up and down the river until we are tired of it. I will pay what it costs."

It was one of the days when drink would not take hold of him, and he went among his companions, buying drinks and thinking himself a fool to continue furnishing entertainment for the vile crew that sat about him on the deck of the boat. He began shouting and ordering them about.

"Sing louder," he commanded, tramping up and down and scowling at his companions.

A young man of the party who had a reputation as a dancer refused to perform when commanded. Springing forward Sam dragged him out on the deck before the shouting crowd.

"Now dance!" he growled, "or I will throw you into the river."

The young man danced furiously, and Sam marched up and down and looked at him and at the leering faces of the men and women lounging along the deck or shouting at the dancer. The liquor in him beginning to take effect, a queerly distorted version of his old passion for reproduction came to him and he raised his hand for silence.

"I want to see a woman who is a mother," he shouted. "I want to see a woman who has borne children."

A small woman with black hair and burning black eyes sprang from the group gathered about the dancer.

"I have borne children—three of them," she said, laughing up into his face. "I can bear more of them."

Sam looked at her stupidly and taking her by the arm led her to a chair on the deck. The crowd laughed.

"Belle is after his roll," whispered a short, fat man to his companion, a tall woman with blue eyes.

As the steamer, with its load of men and women drinking and singing songs, went up the river past bluffs covered with trees, the woman beside Sam pointed to a row of tiny houses at the top of the bluffs.

"My children are there. They are getting supper now," she said.

She began singing, laughing and waving a bottle to the others sitting along the deck. A youth with heavy features stood upon a chair and sang a song of the street, and, jumping to her feet, Sam's companion kept time with the bottle in her hand. Sam walked over to where the captain stood looking up the river.

"Turn back," he said, "I am tired of this crew."

On the way back down the river the black-eyed woman again sat beside Sam.

"We will go to my house," she said quietly, "just you and me. I will show you the kids."

Darkness was gathering over the river as the boat turned, and in the distance the lights of the city began blinking into view. The crowd had grown quiet, sleeping in chairs along the deck or gathering in small groups and talking in low tones. The black-haired woman began to tell Sam her story.

She was, she said, the wife of a plumber who had left her.

"I drove him crazy," she said, laughing quietly. "He wanted me to stay at home with him and the kids night after night. He used to follow me down town at night begging me to come home. When I wouldn't come he would go away with tears in his eyes. It made me furious. He wasn't a man. He would do anything I asked him to do. And then he ran away and left the kids on my hands."

In the city Sam, with the black-haired woman beside him, rode about in an open carriage, forgetting the children and going from place to place, eating and drinking. For an hour they sat in a box at the theatre, but grew tired of the performance and climbed again into the carriage.

"We will go to my house. I want to have you alone," said the woman.

They drove through street after street of workingmen's houses, where children ran laughing and playing under the lights, and two boys, their bare legs flashing in the lights from the lamps overhead, ran after them, holding to the back of the carriage.