nsteady step, blood-shot eyes, and a noisy attempt at self-
possessed unconcern, to hurry upstairs and crawl into bed in preparation
for another week of toil and respectability. The man had a certain
Rabelaisian sense of humour and kept score of the new ladies met on his
weekly flights by pencil marks upon his bedroom wall. He once took Sam
upstairs to show his record. A row of them ran half around the room.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He began laughing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER II


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What collateral?" he asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER III


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER IV


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sam shook his head.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sam lighted a cigar.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Luella London put the roll of bills into her purse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You grafter!" she sneered.

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

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

Luella reached for her purse.

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

Sam laughed.

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

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

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

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

The actress stared past Sam's shoulder to where a group of young men sat
about a table drinking and talking loudly. Sam began telling an anecdote
of an Irish baggage man in Caxton. When he had finished he looked at her
and laughed.

"As that shoemaker looked to Jerry Donlin so you, as the colonel's wife,
looked to me," he said. "I had to make you get out of my flower bed."

A gleam of resolution came into the wandering eyes of Luella London and
she took the purse from the back of the chair and brought out the roll of
bills.

"I'm a sport," she said, "and I'm going to lay a bet on the best horse I
ever saw. You may trim me, but I always would take a chance."

Turning, she called a waiter and, handing him a bill from her purse, threw
the roll on the table.

"Take the pay for the spread and the wine we have had out of that," she
said, handing him the loose bill and then turning to Sam. "You ought to
beat the world. Anyway your genius gets recognition from me. I pay for
this party and when you see the colonel say good-bye to him for me."

The next day, at his request, Sue Rainey called at the offices of the Arms
Company and Sam handed her the paper signed by Luella London. It was an
agreement on her part to divide with Sam, half and half, any money she
might be able to blackmail out of Colonel Rainey.

The colonel's daughter glanced from the paper to Sam's face.

"I thought so," she said, and a puzzled look came into her eyes. "But I do
not understand this. What does this paper do and what did you pay for it?"

"The paper," Sam answered, "puts her in a hole and I paid ten thousand
dollars for it."

Sue Rainey laughed and taking a checkbook from her handbag laid it on the
desk and sat down.

"Do you get your half?" she asked.

"I get it all," answered Sam, and then leaning back in his chair launched
into an explanation. When he had told her of the talk in the restaurant
she sat with the checkbook lying before her and with the puzzled look
still in her eyes.

Without giving her time for comment, Sam plunged into the midst of what
had been in his mind to say to her.

"The woman will not bother the colonel any more," he declared; "if that
paper won't hold her something else will. She respects me and she is
afraid of me. We had a talk after she had signed the paper and she gave me
the ten thousand dollars to invest for her. I promised to double it for
her within a year and I want to make good. I want you to double it now.
Make the check for twenty thousand."

Sue Rainey wrote the check, making it payable to bearer, and pushed it
across the table.

"I cannot say that I understand yet," she confessed. "Did you also fall in
love with her?"

Sam grinned. He was wondering whether he would be able to get into words
just what he wanted to tell her of the actress soldier of fortune. He
looked across the table at her frank grey eyes and then on an impulse
decided that he would tell it straight out as though she had been a man.

"It's like this," he said. "I like ability and good brains and that woman
has them. She isn't a good woman, but nothing in her life has made her
want to be good. All her life she has been going the wrong way, and now
she wants to get on her feet and squared around. That's what she was after
the colonel for. She did not want to marry him, she wanted to make him
give her the start she was after. I got the best of her because somewhere
there is a snivelling little whelp of a man who has taken all the good and
the fineness out of her and who now stands ready to sell her out for a few
dollars. I imagined there would be such a man when I saw her and I bluffed
my way through to him. But I do not want to whip a woman, even in such an
affair, through the cheapness of some man. I want to do the square thing
by her. That's why I asked you to make that check for twenty thousand."

Sue Rainey rose and stood by the desk looking down at him. He was thinking
how wonderfully clear and honest her eyes.

"And what about the colonel?" she asked. "What will he think of all this?"

Sam walked around the desk and took her hand.

"We'll have to agree not to consider him," he said. "We really did that
you know when we started this thing. I think we can depend upon Miss
London's putting the finishing touches on the job."

And Miss London did. She sent for Sam a week later and put tweny-five
hundred dollars into his hand.

"That's not to invest for me," she said, "that's for yourself. By the
agreement I signed with you we were to split anything I got out of the
colonel. Well, I went light. I only got five thousand dollars."

With the money in his hand Sam stood by the side of a little table in her
room looking at her.

"What did you tell the colonel?" he asked.

"I called him up here to my room last night and lying here in bed I told
him that I had just discovered I was the victim of an incurable disease. I
told him that within a month I would be in bed for keeps and asked him to
marry me at once and to take me away with him to some quiet place where I
could die in his arms."

Coming over to Sam, Luella London put a hand upon his arm and laughed.

"He began to beg off and make excuses," she went on, "and then I brought
out his letters to me and talked straight. He wilted at once and paid the
five thousand dollars I asked for the letters without a murmur. I might
have made it fifty and with your talent you ought to get all he has in six
months."

Sam shook hands with her and told her of his success in doubling the money
she had put into his hands. Then putting the twenty-five hundred dollars
in his pocket he went back to his desk. He did not see her again and when,
through a lucky market turn, he had increased the twenty thousand dollars
she had left with him to twenty-five, he placed it in the hands of a trust
company for her and forgot the incident. Years later he heard that she was
running a fashionable dressmaking establishment in a western city.

And Colonel Tom Rainey, who had for months talked of nothing but factory
efficiency and of what he and young Sam McPherson were going to do in the
way of enlarging the business, began the next morning a tirade against
women that lasted the rest of his life.




CHAPTER V


Sue Rainey had long touched the fancy of the youths of Chicago society
who, while looking at her trim little figure and at the respectable size
of the fortune behind it, were yet puzzled and disconcerted by her
attitude toward themselves. On the wide porches at golf clubs, where young
men in white trousers lounged and smoked cigarettes, and in the down-town
clubs, where the same young men spent winter afternoons playing Kelly
pool, they spoke of her, calling her an enigma. "She'll end by being an
old maid," they declared, and shook their heads at the thought of so good
a connection dangling loosely in the air just without their reach. From
time to time, one of the young men tore himself loose from the group that
contemplated her, and, with an opening volley of books, candy, flowers and
invitations to theatres, charged down upon her, only to have the youthful
ardour of his attack cooled by her prolonged attitude of indifference.
When she was twenty-one, a young English cavalry officer, who came to
Chicago to ride in the horse show had, for some weeks, been seen much in
her company and a report of their engagement had been whispered through
the town and talked of about the nineteenth hole at the country clubs. The
rumour proved to be without foundation, the attraction to the cavalry
officer having been a certain brand of rare old wine the colonel had
stored in his cellar and a feeling of brotherhood with the swaggering old
gun maker, rather than the colonel's quiet little daughter.

After the beginning of his acquaintanceship with her, and all during the
days when he stirred things up in the offices and shops of the gun
company, tales of the assiduous and often needy young men who were camped
on her trail reached Sam's ears. They would be in at the office to see and
talk with the colonel, who had several times confided to Sam that his
daughter Sue was already past the age at which right-minded young women
should marry, and in the absence of the father two or three of them had
formed a habit of stopping for a word with Sam, whom they had met through
the colonel or Jack Prince. They declared that they were "squaring
themselves with the colonel." Not a difficult thing to do, Sam thought, as
he drank the wine, smoked the cigars, and ate the dinners of all without
prejudice. Once, at luncheon, Colonel Tom discussed these young men with
Sam, pounding on a table so that the glasses jumped about, and calling
them damned upstarts.

For his own part, Sam did not feel that he knew Sue Rainey, and although,
after their first meeting one evening at the Rainey house, he had been
pricked by a mild curiosity concerning her, no opportunity to satisfy it
had presented itself. He knew that she was athletic, travelled much, rode,
shot, and sailed a boat; and he had heard Jack Prince speak of her as a
woman of brains, but, until the incident of the colonel and Luella London
threw them for the moment into the same enterprise and started him
thinking of her with real interest, he had seen and talked with her for
but brief passing moments brought about by their mutual interest in the
affairs of her father.

After Janet Eberly's sudden death, and while he was yet in the midst of
his grief at her loss, Sam had his first long talk with Sue Rainey. It was
in Colonel Tom's office, and Sam, walking hurriedly in, found her sitting
at the colonel's desk and staring out of the window at a broad expanse of
flat roofs. A man, climbing a flag pole to replace a slipped rope, caught
his attention and standing by the window looking at the minute figure
clinging to the swaying pole, he began talking of the absurdity of human
endeavour.

The colonel's daughter listened respectfully to his rather obvious
banalities and getting up from her chair came to stand beside him. Sam
turned slyly to look at her firm brown cheeks as he had looked on the
morning when she had come to see him about Luella London and was struck by
the thought that she in some faint way reminded him of Janet Eberly. In a
moment, and rather to his own surprise, he burst into a long speech
telling of Janet, of the tragedy of her loss and something of the beauty
of her life and character.

The nearness of his loss and the nearness also of what he thought might be
a sympathetic listener spurred him and he found himself getting a kind of
relief for the aching sense of loss for his dead comrade by heaping
praises upon her life.

When he had finished saying what was in his mind, he stood by the window
feeling awkward and embarrassed. The man who climbed the flag pole having
put the rope through the ring at the top slid suddenly down the pole and
thinking for the moment that he had fallen Sam made a quick clutch at the
air with his hand. His gripping fingers closed over Sue Rainey's hand.

He turned, amused by the incident, and began making a halting explanation.
There were tears in Sue Rainey's eyes.

"I wish I had known her," she said and drew her hand from between his
fingers. "I wish you had known me better that I also might have known your
Janet. They are rare--such women. They are worth much to know. Most women
like most men--"

She made an impatient gesture with her hand and Sam, turning, walked
toward the door. He felt that he might not trust himself to answer her.
For the first time since coming to manhood he felt that tears might at any
moment come into his eyes. Grief for the loss of Janet surged through him
disconcerting and engulfing him.

"I have been doing you an injustice," said Sue Rainey, looking at the
floor. "I have thought of you as something different from what you are.
There is a story I heard of you which gave me a wrong impression."

Sam smiled. Having conquered the commotion within himself, he laughed and
explained the incident of the man who had slid down the pole.

"What was the story you heard?" he asked.

"It was a story a young man told at our house," she explained
hesitatingly, refusing to be carried away from her mood of seriousness.
"It was about a little girl you saved from drowning and a purse made up
and given you. Why did you take the money?"

Sam looked at her squarely. The story was one that Jack Prince had delight
in telling. It concerned an incident of his early business life in the
city.

One afternoon, when he was still in the employ of the commission firm, he
had taken a party of men for a trip on an excursion steamer on the lake.
He had a project into which he wanted them to go with him and had taken
them aboard the steamer to get them together and present the merits of his
scheme. During the trip a little girl had fallen overboard and Sam,
springing after her, had brought her safely aboard the boat.

On the excursion steamer a cheer had arisen. A young man in a broad-
brimmed cowboy hat ran about taking up a collection. People crowded
forward to grasp Sam's hand and he had accepted the money collected and
had put it in his pocket.

Among the men aboard the boat were several who, while they did not draw
back from going into Sam's project, had thought his taking the money not
manly. They had told the story, and it had come to the ears of Jack
Prince, who never tired of repeating it and always ended the story with
the request that the listener ask Sam why he had taken the money.

Now in Colonel Tom's office facing Sue Rainey, Sam made the explanation
that had so delighted Jack Prince.

"The crowd wanted to give me the money," he said, slightly perplexed. "Why
shouldn't I have taken it? I did not save the little girl for the money,
but because she was a little girl; and the money paid for my ruined
clothes and the expenses of the trip."

With his hand on the doorknob he looked steadily at the woman before him.

"And I wanted the money," he announced, a ring of defiance in his voice.
"I have always wanted money, any money I could get."

Sam went back to his own office and sat down at his desk. He had been
surprised by the cordiality and friendliness Sue Rainey had shown toward
him. On an impulse, he wrote a letter, defending his position in the
matter of the money taken on the excursion steamer and setting forth
something of the attitude of his mind toward money and business affairs.

"I cannot see myself believing in the rot most business men talk," he
wrote at the end of the letter. "They are full of sentiment and ideals
which are not true. Having a thing to sell they always say it is the best,
although it may be third rate. I do not object to that. What I do object
to is the way they have of nursing a hope within themselves that the third
rate thing is first rate until the hope becomes a belief. In the talk I
had with that actress Luella London I told her that I myself flew the
black flag. Well, I do. I would lie about goods to sell them, but I would
not lie to myself. I will not stultify my own mind. If a man crosses
swords with me in a business deal and I come out of the affair with the
money, it is no sign that I am the greater rascal, rather it is a sign
that I am the keener man."

With the note lying before him on the desk Sam wondered why he had written
it. It seemed to him an accurate and straightforward statement of the
business creed he had adopted for himself, but a rather absurd note to
write to a woman. And then, not allowing himself time to reconsider his
action, he addressed an envelope and going out into the general offices
dropped it into the mail chute.

"It will let her know where I stand anyway," he thought, with a return of
the defiant mood in which he had told her the motive of his action on the
boat.

Within the next ten days after the talk in Colonel Tom's office Sam saw
Sue Rainey several times coming to or going from her father's office.
Once, meeting in the little lobby by the office entrance, she stopped and
put out her hand which Sam took awkwardly. He had a feeling that she would
not have regretted an opportunity to continue the sudden little intimacy
that had sprung up between them in the few minutes' talk of Janet Eberly.
The feeling did not come from vanity but from a belief in Sam that she was
in some way lonely and wanting companionship. Although she had been much
courted she lacked, he thought, the talent for comradeship or quick
friendliness. "Like Janet she is more than half intellect," he told
himself, and felt a pang of regret for the slight disloyalty of the
further thought that there was in Sue a something more substantial and
solid than there had been in Janet.

Suddenly Sam began wondering whether or not he would like to marry Sue
Rainey. His mind played with the idea. He took it with him to bed, and it
went with him all day in his hurried trips through offices and shops. The
thought having come to him persisted, and he began seeing her in a new
light. The odd half awkward little movements of her hands, and their
expressiveness, the brown fine texture of her cheeks, the clearness and
honesty of her grey eyes, the quick sympathy and understanding of his
feeling for Janet, and the subtle flattery of the notion he had got that
she was interested in him--all of these things came and went in his mind
while he ran through columns of figures and laid plans for the expansion
of the business of the Arms Company. Unconsciously he began to make her a
part of his plans for the future.

Later, Sam discovered that during the days after the first talk together
the thought of a marriage between them was in Sue's mind also. After the
talk she went home and stood for an hour before the glass studying herself
and she once told Sam that in her bed that night she shed tears because
she had never been able to arouse in a man the note of tenderness that had
been in his voice when he talked to her of Janet.

And then two months after the first talk they had another. Sam, who had
not allowed his grief over the loss of Janet or his nightly efforts to
drown the sting of it in hard drinking, to check the big forward movement
that he felt he was getting into the work of the offices and shops, sat
one afternoon deeply absorbed in a pile of factory cost sheets. His shirt
sleeves were rolled to the elbow, showing his white muscular forearms. He
was absorbed, intent upon the sheets.

"I stepped in," said a voice above his head.

Glancing up quickly, Sam sprang to his feet. "She must have been there
some minutes looking down at me," he thought, and had a thrill of pleasure
in the thought.

Into his mind came the contents of the letter he had written her, and he
wondered if after all he had been a fool, and whether the thoughts of a
marriage with her were but vagaries. "Perhaps it would not be attractive
to either her or myself when we came up to it," he decided.

"I stepped in," she began again. "I have been thinking. Some things you
said--in the letter and when you talked of your friend Janet who died--
some things of men and women and work. You may not remember them. I--I got
interested. I--are you a socialist?"

"I believe not," Sam answered, wondering what had given her that thought.
"Are you?"

She laughed and shook her head.

"Just what are you?" she went on. "What do you believe? I am curious to
know. I thought your note--you will pardon me--I thought it a kind of
pretence."

Sam winced. A shadow of doubt of the sincerity of his business philosophy
crossed his mind accompanied by the swaggering figure of Windy McPherson.
He came around the desk and leaning against it looked at her. His
secretary had gone out of the room and they were alone together. Sam
laughed.

"There was a man in the town where I was raised used to say that I was a
little mole working underground, intent upon worms," he said, and then,
waving his arms toward the papers on the desk, added, "I am a business
man. Isn't that enough? If you could go with me through some of these cost
sheets you would agree they are needed."

He turned and faced her again.

"What should I be doing with beliefs?" he asked.

"Well, I think you have them--some kind of beliefs," she insisted, "you
must have them. You get things done. You should hear the men talk of you.
Sometimes at the house they are quite foolish about what a wonderful
fellow you are and what you are doing here. They say that you drive on and
on. What drives you? I want to know."

For the moment Sam half suspected that she was secretly laughing at him.
Finding her quite serious he started to reply and then stopped, regarding
her.

The silence between them went on and on. A clock on the wall ticked
loudly.

Sam stepped nearer to her and stood looking down into the face she slowly
turned up to his.

"I want to have a talk with you," he said, and his voice broke. He had the
illusion of a hand gripping at his throat.

In a flash he had definitely decided that he would try to marry her. Her
interest in the motives of his life had clinched the sort of half decision
he had made. In an illuminating moment during the prolonged silence
between them he had seen her in a new light. The feeling of vague intimacy
brought to him by his thoughts of her became a fixed belief that she
belonged to him--was a part of him--and he was charmed with her manner,
and her person, standing there, as with a gift given him.

And then into his mind came a hundred other thoughts, clamouring thoughts,
come out of the hidden parts of him. He began to think that she could lead
the way on a road he wanted to travel. He thought of her wealth and what
it would mean to a man filled with his hunger for power. And through these
thoughts shot others. Something in her had taken hold of him--something
that had been also in Janet. He was curious concerning her curiosity about
his beliefs, and wanted to q