uestion her concerning her own beliefs. He
could see none of Colonel Tom's blustering incompetence in her and thought
her filled with truth as a deep spring is filled with clear water. He
believed she would give him something, something that all his life he had
been wanting. An old aching hunger that had haunted his nights as a boy
came back and he thought that at her hand it might be fed.

"I--I must read a book about socialism," he said lamely.

Again they stood in silence, she looking at the floor, he past her head
and out at the window. He could not bring himself to speak again of the
proposed talk. He had a boyish dread of having her notice the tremor in
his voice.

Colonel Tom came into the room, bursting with an idea Sam had given him at
the lunch hour and which in working its way into his mind had become to
the colonel's entirely honest belief an idea of his own. The interruption
brought to Sam an intense feeling of relief and he began talking of the
colonel's idea as though it had taken him unawares.

Sue, walking to a window, began tying and untying the curtain cord. When
Sam, raising his eyes, looked at her, he caught her eyes watching him
intently and she smiled, continuing to look at him squarely. It was his
eyes that first broke away.

From that day Sam's mind was afire with thoughts of Sue Rainey. In his
room he sat, or going into Grant Park stood by the lake, looking at the
silent, moving water as he had looked in the days when he first came to
the city. He did not dream of having her in his arms or of kissing her
lips; he thought, instead, with a glowing heart, of a life lived with her.
He wanted to walk beside her through the streets, to have her come
suddenly in at his office door, to look into her eyes and to have her
question him, as she had questioned, concerning his beliefs and his hopes.
He thought that in the evening he would like to go to a house of his own
and find her sitting there waiting for him. All the charm of his aimless,
half-dissolute way of life died in him, and he believed that with her he
could begin to live more fully and completely. From the moment when he had
definitely decided that he wanted Sue as a wife, Sam stopped overdrinking,
going to his room or walking through the streets or in the parks instead
of seeking his old companions in the clubs and drinking places. Sometimes
pushing his bed to the window overlooking the lake, he would undress
immediately after dinner and opening the window would spend half the night
watching the lights of boats far away over the water and thinking of her.
He would imagine her in the room, moving here and there, and coming
occasionally to put her hand in his hair and look down at him as Janet had
done, helping by her sane talk and quiet ways to get his life straightened
out for good living.

And when he had fallen asleep the face of Sue Rainey came to visit his
dreams. One night he thought she had become blind and sat in the room with
sightless eyes saying over and over like one demented, "Truth, truth, give
me back the truth that I may see," and he awoke sick with horror at the
thought of the look of suffering that had been in her face. Never did Sam
dream of having her in his arms or of raining kisses on her lips and neck
as he had dreamed of other women who in the past had won his favour.

For all that he thought of her so constantly and built so confidently his
dream of a life to be spent with her, months passed before he saw her
again. Through Colonel Tom he learned that she had gone for a visit to the
East and he went earnestly about his work, keeping his mind on his
business during the day and only in the evening allowing himself to become
absorbed in thoughts of her. He had a feeling that although he had said
nothing she knew of his desire for her and that she wanted time to think
it over. Several times in the evening in his room he wrote her long
letters filled with minute, boyish explanations of his thoughts and
motives, letters which after writing he immediately destroyed. A woman of
the west side, with whom he had once had an affair, met him one day on the
street, and put her hand familiarly on his arm and for the moment
reawakened in him an old desire. After leaving her he did not go back to
the office, but taking a south-bound car, spent the afternoon walking in
Jackson Park, watching the children at play on the grass, sitting on
benches under the trees, getting out of his body and his mind the
insistent call of the flesh that had come back to him.

Then in the evening, he came suddenly upon Sue riding a spirited black
horse in a bridle path at the upper end of the park. It was just at the
grey beginning of night. Stopping the horse, she sat looking at him and
going to her he put a hand on the bridle.

"We might have that talk," he said.

She smiled down at him and the colour began to rise in her brown cheeks.

"I have been thinking of it," she said, the familiar serious look coming
into her eyes. "After all what have we to say to each other?"

Sam watched her steadily.

"I have a lot of things to say to you," he announced. "That is to say--
well--I have, if things are as I hope." She got off the horse and they
stood together by the side of the path. Sam never forgot the few minutes
of silence that followed. The wide prospects of green sward, the golf
player trudging wearily toward them through the uncertain light, his bag
upon his shoulder, the air of physical fatigue with which he walked,
bending slightly forward, the faint, soft sound of waves washing over a
low beach, and the intense waiting look on the face she turned up to him,
made an impression on his mind that stayed with him through life. It
seemed to him that he had arrived at a kind of culmination, a starting
point, and that all the vague shadowy uncertainties that had, in
reflective moments, flitted through his mind, were to be brushed away by
some act, some word, from the lips of this woman. With a rush he realised
how consistently he had been thinking of her and how enormously he had
been counting on her falling in with his plans, and the realisation was
followed by a sickening moment of fear. How little he actually knew of her
and of her way of thought. What assurance had he that she would not laugh,
jump back upon the horse, and ride away? He was afraid as he had never
been afraid before. Dumbly his mind groped about for a way to begin.
Expressions he had caught and noted in her strong serious little face when
he had achieved but a mild curiosity concerning her came back to visit his
mind and he tried desperately to build an instant idea of her from these.
And then turning his face from her he plunged directly into his thoughts
of the past months as though she had been sharing talking to the colonel."

"I have been thinking we might marry, you and I," he said, and cursed
himself for the blundering bluntness of the declaration.

"You do get things done, don't you?" she replied, smiling.

"Why should you have been thinking anything of the sort?"

"Because I want to live with you," he said; "I have been talking to the
colonel."

"About marrying me?" She seemed about to begin laughing.

He hurried on. "No, not that. We talked about you. I could not let him
alone. He might have known. I kept making him talk. I made him tell me
about your ideas. I felt I had to know."

Sam faced her.

"He thinks your ideas absurd. I do not. I like them. I like you. I think
you are beautiful. I do not know whether I love you or not, but for weeks
I have been thinking of you and clinging to you and saying over and over
to myself, 'I want to live my life with Sue Rainey.' I did not expect to
go at it this way. You know me. What you do not know I will tell you."

"Sam McPherson, you are a wonder," she said, "and I do not know but that I
will marry you in the end, but I can't tell now. I want to know a lot of
things. I want to know if you are ready to believe what I believe and to
live for what I want to live."

The horse, growing restless, began tugging at the bridle and she spoke to
him sharply. She plunged into a description of a man she had seen on the
lecture platform during her visit to the East and Sam looked at her with
puzzled eyes.

"He was beautiful," she said. "He was past sixty but looked like a boy of
twenty-five, not in his body, but in an air of youth that hung over him.
He stood there before the people talking, quiet, able, efficient. He was
clean. He had lived clean, body and mind. He had been companion and co-
worker with William Morris, and once he had been a mine boy in Wales, but
he had got hold of a vision and lived for it. I did not hear what he said,
but I kept thinking, 'I want a man like that.'

"Can you accept my beliefs and live for what I want to live?" she
persisted.

Sam looked at the ground. It seemed to him that he was going to lose her,
that she would not marry him.

"I am not accepting beliefs or ends in life blindly," he said stoutly,
"but I want them. What are your beliefs? I want to know. I think I haven't
any myself. When I reach for them they are gone. My mind shifts and
changes. I want something solid. I like solid things. I want you."

"When can we meet and talk everything over thoroughly?"

"Now," answered Sam bluntly, some look in her face changing his whole
viewpoint. Suddenly it seemed as though a door had been opened, letting in
a strong light upon the darkness of his mind. His confidence had come back
to him. He wanted to strike and keep on striking. The blood rushed through
his body and his brain began working rapidly. He felt sure of ultimate
success.

Taking her hand, and leading the horse, he began walking with her along
the path. Her hand trembled in his and as though answering a thought in
his mind she looked up at him and said,

"I am not different from other women, although I do not accept your offer.
This is a big moment for me, perhaps the biggest moment of my life. I want
you to know that I feel that, though I do want certain things more than I
want you or any other man."

There was a suggestion of tears in her voice and Sam had a feeling that
the woman in her wanted him to take her into his arms, but something
within him told him to wait and to help her by waiting. Like her he wanted
something more than the feel of a woman in his arms. Ideas rushed through
his head; he thought that she was going to give him some bigger idea than
he had known. The figure she had drawn for him of the old man who stood on
the platform, young and beautiful, the old boyish need of a purpose in
life, the dreams of the last few weeks--all of these were a part of the
eager curiosity in him. They were like hungry little animals waiting to be
fed. "We must have it all out here and now," he told himself. "I must not
let myself be swept away by a rush of feeling and I must not let her be.

"Do not think," he said, "that I haven't tenderness for you. I am filled
with it. But I want to have our talk. I want to know what you expect me to
believe and how you want me to live."

He felt her hand stiffen in his.

"Whether or not we are worth while to each other," she added.

"Yes," he said.

And then she began to talk, telling him in a quiet steady voice that
steadied something in him what she wanted to make out of her life. Her
idea was one of service to mankind through children. She had seen girl
friends of hers, with whom she had gone to school, grow up and marry. They
had wealth and education, fine well-trained bodies, and they had been
married only to live lives more fully devoted to pleasure. One or two who
had married poor men had only done so to satisfy a passion in themselves,
and after marriage had joined the others in the hungry pursuit of
pleasure.

"They do nothing at all," she said, "to repay the world for the things
given them, the wealth and well-trained bodies and the disciplined minds.
They go through life day after day and year after year wasting themselves
and come in the end to nothing but indolent, slovenly vanity."

She had thought it all out and had tried to plan for herself a life with
other ends, and wanted a husband in accord with her ideas.

"That isn't so difficult," she said, "I can find a man whom I can control
and who will believe as I believe. My money gives me that power. But I
want him to be a real man, a man of ability, a man who does things for
himself, one fitted by his life and his achievements to be the father of
children who do things. And so I began thinking about you. I got the men
who come to the house to talk of you."

She hung her head and laughed like a bashful boy.

"I know much of the story of your early life out in that Iowa town," she
said. "I got the story of your life and your achievements out there from
some one who knew you well."

The idea seemed wonderfully simple and beautiful to Sam. It seemed to add
tremendously to the dignity and nobility of his feeling for her. He
stopped in the path and swung her about facing him. They were alone in
that end of the park. The soft darkness of the summer night had settled
over them. In the grass at their feet a cricket sang loudly. He made a
movement to take her into his arms.

"It is wonderful," he said.

"Wait," she demanded, putting her hand against his shoulder. "It isn't so
simple. I am wealthy. You are able and you have a kind of undying energy
in you. I want to give both my wealth and your ability to children--our
children. That will not be easy for you. It means giving up your dreams of
power. Perhaps I shall lose courage. Women do after two or three have
come. You will have to furnish that. You will have to make a mother of me
and keep making a mother of me. You will have to be a new kind of father
with something maternal in you. You will have to be patient and studious
and kind. You will have to think of these things at night instead of
thinking of your own advancement. You will have to live wholly for me
because I am to be their mother, giving me your strength and courage and
your good sane outlook on things. And then when they come you will have to
give all these things to them day after day in a thousand little ways."

Sam took her into his arms and for the first time in his memory the hot
tears stood in his eyes.

The horse, unattended, wheeled, threw up his head and trotted off down the
path. They let him go, walking along after him hand in hand like two happy
children. At the entrance to the park they came up to him, held by a park
policeman. She got on the horse and Sam stood beside her looking up.

"I'll tell the colonel in the morning," he said.

"What will he say?" she murmured, musingly.

"Damned ingrate," Sam mimicked the colonel's blustering throat tones.

She laughed and picked up the reins. Sam laid his hand on hers.

"How soon?" he asked.

She put her head down near his.

"We'll waste no time," she said, blushing.

And then in the presence of a park policeman, in the street by the
entrance to the park with the people passing up and down, Sam had his
first kiss from Sue Rainey's lips.

After she rode away Sam walked. He had no sense of the passing of time,
wandering through street after street, rearranging and readjusting his
outlook on life. What she had said had stirred every vestige of sleeping
nobility in him. He thought that he had got hold of the thing he had
unconsciously been seeking all his life. His dreams of control of the
Rainey Arms Company and the other big things he had planned in business
seemed, in the light of their talk, so much nonsense and vanity. "I will
live for this! I will live for this!" he kept saying over and over to
himself. He imagined he could see the little white things lying in Sue's
arms, and his new love for her and for what they were to accomplish
together ran through him and hurt him so that he felt like shouting in the
darkened streets. He looked up at the sky and saw the stars and thought
they looked down on two new and glorious beings living on the earth.

At a corner he turned and came into a quiet residence street where frame
houses stood in the midst of little green lawns and thoughts of his
boyhood in the Iowa town came back to him. And then his mind moving
forward, he remembered nights in the city when he had stolen away to the
arms of women. Hot shame burned in his cheeks and his eyes felt hot.

"I must go to her--I must go to her at her house--now--tonight--and tell
her all of these things, and beg her to forgive me," he thought.

And then the absurdity of such a course striking him he laughed aloud.

"It cleanses me! this cleanses me!" he said to himself.

He remembered the men who had sat about the stove in Wildman's grocery
when he was a boy and the stories they sometimes told. He remembered how
he, as a boy in the city, had run through the crowded streets fleeing from
the terror of lust. He began to understand how distorted, how strangely
perverted, his whole attitude toward women and sex had been. "Sex is a
solution, not a menace--it is wonderful," he told himself without knowing
fully the meaning of the word that had sprung to his lips.

When, at last, he turned into Michigan Avenue and went toward his
apartment, the late moon was just mounting the sky and a clock in one of
the sleeping houses was striking three.




CHAPTER VI


One evening, six weeks after the talk in the gathering darkness in Jackson
Park, Sue Rainey and Sam McPherson sat on the deck of a Lake Michigan
steamer watching the lights of Chicago blink out in the distance. They had
been married that afternoon in Colonel Tom's big house on the south side;
and now they sat on the deck of the boat, being carried out into darkness,
vowed to motherhood and to fatherhood, each more or less afraid of the
other. They sat in silence, looking at the blinking lights and listening
to the low voices of their fellow passengers, also sitting in the chairs
along the deck or strolling leisurely about, and to the wash of the water
along the sides of the boat, eager to break down a little reserve that the
solemnity of the marriage service had built up between them.

A picture floated in Sam's mind. He saw Sue, all in white, radiant and
wonderful, coming toward him down a broad stairway, toward him, the
newsboy of Caxton, the smuggler of game, the roisterer, the greedy
moneygetter. All during those six weeks he had been waiting for this hour
when he should sit beside the little grey-clad figure, getting from her
the help he wanted in the reconstruction of his life. Without being able
to talk as he had thought of talking, he yet felt assured and easy in his
mind. In the moment when she had come down the stairway he had been half
overcome by a feeling of intense shame, a return of the shame that had
swept over him that night when she had given her word and he had walked
hour after hour through the streets. It had seemed to him that from among
the guests standing about should arise a voice crying, "Stop! Do not go
on! Let me tell you of this fellow--this McPherson!" And then he had seen
her holding to the arm of swaggering, pretentious Colonel Tom and he had
taken her hand to become one with her, two curious, feverish, strangely
different human beings, taking a vow in the name of their God, with the
flowers banked about them and the eyes of people upon them.

When Sam had gone to Colonel Tom the morning after that evening in Jackson
Park, there had been a scene. The old gun maker had blustered and roared
and forbidden, pounding on his desk with his fist. When Sam remained cool
and unimpressed, he had stormed out of the room slamming the door and
shouting, "Upstart! Damned upstart!" and Sam had gone smiling back to his
desk, mildly disappointed. "I told Sue he would say 'Ingrate,'" he
thought, "I am losing my skill at guessing just what he will do and say."

The colonel's rage had been short-lived. Within a week he was boasting of
Sam to chance callers as "the best business man in America," and in the
face of a solemn promise given Sue was telling news of the approaching
marriage to every newspaper man he knew. Sam suspected him of secretly
calling on the telephone those newspapers whose representatives had not
crossed his trail.

During the six waiting weeks there had been little of love making between
Sue and Sam. They had talked instead, or, going into the country or to the
parks, had walked under the trees consumed with a curious eager passion of
suspense. The idea she had given him in the park grew in Sam's brain. To
live for the young things that would presently come to them, to be simple,
direct, and natural, like the trees or the beasts of the field, and then
to have the native honesty of such a life illuminated and ennobled by a
mutual intelligent purpose to make their young something finer and better
than the things in Nature by the intelligent use of their own good minds
and bodies. In the shops and on the streets the hurrying men and women
took on a new significance to him. He wondered what secret mighty purpose
might be in their lives, and read a newspaper report of an engagement or a
marriage with a little jump of the heart. He looked at the girls and the
women at work over the typewriting machines in the office, with
questioning eyes, asking himself why they did not seek marriage openly and
determinedly, and saw a healthy single woman as so much wasted material,
as a machine for producing healthy new life standing idle and unused in
the great workshop of the universe. "Marriage is a port, a beginning, a
point of departure, from which men and women go forth upon the real voyage
of life," he told Sue one evening as they walked in the park. "All that
goes before is but a preparation, a building. The pains and the triumphs
of all unmarried people are but the good oak planks being driven into
place to make the vessel fit for the real voyage." Or, again, one night
when they were in a rowboat on the lagoon in the park and all about them
in the darkness was the plash of oars in the water, the screams of excited
girls, and the sound of voices calling, he let the boat float in against
the shores of a little island and crept along the boat to kneel, with his
head in her lap and whisper, "It is not the love of a woman that grips me,
Sue, but the love of life. I have had a peep into the great mystery. This
--this is why we are here--this justifies us."

Now that she sat beside him, her shoulder against his own, being carried
away with him into darkness and privacy, the personal side of his love for
her ran through Sam like a flame and, turning, he drew her head down upon
his shoulder.

"Not yet, Sam," she whispered, "not with these hundreds of people sleeping
and drinking and thinking and going about their affairs almost within
touch of our hands."

They got up and walked along the swaying deck. Out of the north the clean
wind called to them, the stars looked down upon them, and in the darkness
in the bow of the boat they parted for the night silently, speechless with
happiness and with a dear, unmentioned secret between them.

At dawn they landed at a little lumbering town, where boat, blankets, and
camping kit had gone before. A river flowed down out of the woods passing
the town, going under a bridge and turning the wheel of a sawmill that
stood by the shore of the river facing the lake. The clean sweet smell of
the new-cut logs, the song of the saws, the roar of the water tumbling
over a dam, the cries of the blue-shirted lumbermen working among the
floating logs above the dam, filled the morning air, and above the song of
the saws sang another song, a breathless, waiting song, the song of love
and of life singing in the hearts of husband and wife.

In a little roughly-built lumberman's hotel they ate breakfast in a room
overlooking the river. The proprietor of the hotel, a large red-faced
woman in a clean calico dress, was expecting them and, having served the
breakfast, went out of the room grinning good naturedly and closing the
door behind her. Through the open window they looked at the cold swiftly-
flowing river and at a freckled-faced boy who carried packages wrapped in
blankets and put them in a long canoe tied to a little wharf beside the
hotel. They ate and sat staring at each other like two strange boys,
saying nothing. Sam ate little. His heart pounded in his breast.

On the river he sank his paddle deep into the water, pulling against the
current. During the six weeks' waiting in Chicago she had taught him the
essentials of the canoeist's art and, now, as he shot the canoe under the
bridge and around a bend of the river out of sight of the town, a
superhuman strength seemed in his arms and back. Before him in the prow of
the boat sat Sue, her straight muscular little back bending and
straightening again. By his side rose towering hills clothed with pine
trees, and piles of cut logs lay at the foot of the hills along the shore.

At sunset they landed in a little cleared space at the foot of a hill and
on the top of the hill, with the wind blowing across it, they made their
first camp. Sam brought boughs and spread them, lapped like feathers in
the wings of a bird, and carried blankets up the hill, while Sue, at the
foot, near the overturned boat, built a fire and prepared their first
cooked meal out of doors. In the failing light, Sue got out her rifle and
gave Sam his first lesson in marksmanship, his awkwardness making the
lesson half a jest. And then, in the soft stillness of the young night,
with the first stars coming into the sky and the clean cold wind blowing
into their faces, they went arm in arm up the hill under the trees to
where the tops of the trees rolled and pitched like the stormy waters of a
great sea before their eyes, and lay down together for their first long
tender embrace.

There is a special kind of fine pleasure in getting one's first knowledge
of the great outdoors in the company of a woman a man loves and to have
that woman an expert, with a keen appetite for the life, adds point and
flavour to the experience. In his busy striving, nickel-seeking boyhood in
the town surrounded by hot cornfields, and in his young manhood of
scheming and money hunger in the city, Sam had not thought of vacations
and resting places. He had walked on country roads with John Telfer and
Mary Underwood, listening to their talk, absorbing their ideas, blind and
deaf to the little life in the grass, in the leafy branches of the trees
and in the air about him. In clubs, and about hotels and barrooms in the
city, he had heard men talk of life in the open, and had said to himself,
"When my time comes I will taste these things."

And now he did taste them, lying on his back on the grass along the river,
floating down quiet little side streams in the moonlight, listening to the
night call of birds, or watching the flight of frightened wild things as
he pushed the canoe into the quiet depths of the great forest about them.

At night, under the little tent they had brought, or beneath the blankets
under the stars, he slept lightly, awakening often to look at Sue lying
beside him. Perhaps the wind had blown a wisp of hair across her face and
her breath played with it, tossing it about; perhaps just the quiet of her
expressive little face charmed and held him, so that he turned reluctantly
to sleep again thinking that he might, with pleasure, go on looking at her
all night.

For Sue the days also passed lightly. She also awoke in the night and lay
looking at the man sleeping beside her, and once she told Sam that when he
awoke she feigned sleep dreading to rob him of the pleasure that she knew
these secret love passages gave to both.

They were not alone in those northern woods. Everywhere along the rivers
and on the shores of little lakes they found people, to Sam a new kind of
people, who dropped all the ordinary things of life, and ran away to the
woods and the streams to spend long happy months in the open. He
discovered with surprise that these adventurers were men of modest
fortunes, small manufacturers, skilled workingmen, retail merchants. One
with whom he talked was a grocer from a town in Ohio, and when Sam asked
him if the coming to the woods with his family for an eight-weeks stay did
not endanger the success of his business he agreed with Sam that it did,
nodding his head and laughing.

"But there would be a lot more danger in not leaving it," he said, "the
danger of having my boys grow up to be men without my having any real fun
with them."

Among all of the people they met Sue passed with a sort of happy freedom
that confounded Sam, as he had formed a habit of thinking of her always as
one shut within herself. Many of the people they saw she knew, and he came
to believe that she had chosen the place for their love making because she
admired and held in high favour the lives of these people of the out-of-
doors and wanted her lover to be in some way like them. Out of the
solitude of the woods, along the shores of little lakes, they called to
her as she passed, demanding that she come ashore and show her husband,
and among them she sat talking of other seasons and of the inroads of the
lumber men upon their paradise. "The Burnhams were this year on the shores
of Grant Lake, the two school teachers from Pittsburgh would come early in
August, the Detroit man with the crippled son was building a cabin on the
shores of Bone River."

Sam sat among them in silence, renewing constantly his admiration for the
wonder of Sue's past life. She, the daughter of Colonel Tom, the woman
rich in her own right, to have made her friends among these people; she,
who had been pronounced an enigma by the young men of Chicago, to have
been secretly all of these years the companion and fellow spirit of these
campers by the lakes.

For six weeks they led a wandering, nomadic life in that half wild land,
for Sue six weeks of tender love making, and of the expression of every
thought and impulse of her fine nature, for Sam six weeks of readjustment
and freedom, during which he learned to sail a boat, to shoot, and to get
the fine taste of that life into his being.

And then one morning they came again to the little lumber town at the
mouth of the river and sat upon the pier waiting for the Chicago boat.
They were bound once more into the world, and to that life together that
was the foundation of their marriage and that was to be the end and aim of
their two lives.

If Sam's life from boyhood had been, on the whole, barren and empty of
many of the sweeter things, his life during the next year was strikingly
full and complete. In the office he had ceased being the pushing upstart
tramping on the toes of tradition and had become the son of Colonel Tom,
the voter of Sue's big stock holdings, the practical, directing head and
genius of the destinies of the company. Jack Prince's loyalty had been
rewarded, and a huge advertising campaign made the name and merits of the
Rainey Arms Company's wares known to all reading Americans. The muzzles of
Rainey-Whittaker rifles, revolvers, and shotguns looked threateningly out
at one from the pages of the great popular magazines, brown fur-clad
hunters did brave deeds before one's eyes, kneeling upon snow-topped crags
preparing to speed winged death to waiting mountain sheep; huge open-
mouthed bears rushed down from among the type at the top of the pages and
seemed about to devour cool deliberate sportsmen who stood undaunted,
swinging their trusty Rainey-Whittakers into place, and presidents,
explorers, and Texas gun fighters loudly proclaimed the merits of Rainey-
Whittakers to a gun-buying world. It was for Sam and for Colonel Tom a
time of big dividends, mechanical progress, and contentment.

Sam stayed diligently at work in the offices and in the shops, but kept
within himself a reserve of strength and resolution that might have gone
into the work. With Sue he took up golf and morning rides on horseback,
and with Sue he sat during the long evenings, reading aloud, absorbing her
ideas and her beliefs. Sometimes for days they were like two children,
going off together to walk on country roads and to sleep in country
hotels. On these walks they went hand in hand or, bantering each other,
raced down long hills to lie panting in the grass by the roadside when
they were out of breath.

Near the end of the first year she told him one night of the realisation
of their hopes and they sat through the evening alone by the fire in her
room, filled with the white wonder of it, renewing to each other all the
fine vows of their early love-making days.

Sam never succeeded in recapturing the flavour of those days. Happiness is
a thing so vague, so indefinite, so dependent on a thousand little turns
of the events of the day, that it only visits the most fortunate and at
rare intervals, but Sam thought that he and Sue touched almost ideal
happiness constantly during that time. There were weeks and even months of
their first year together that later passed out of Sam's memory entirely,
leaving only a sense of completeness and well being. He could remember,
perhaps, a winter walk in the moonlight by the frozen lake, or a visitor
who sat and talked an evening away by their fire. But at the end he had to
come back to this: that something sang in his heart all day long and that
the air tasted better, the stars shone more brightly, and the wind and the
rain and the hail upon the window panes sang more sweetly in his ears. He
and the woman who lived with him had wealth, position, and infinite
delight in the presence and the persons of each other, and a great idea
burned like a lamp in a window at the end of the road they travelled.

Meanwhile, in the world about him events came and went. A president was
elected, the grey wolves were being hunted out of the Chicago city
council, and a strong rival to his company flourished in his own city. In
other days he would have been down upon this rival fighting, planning,
working for its destruction. Now he sat at Sue's feet, dreaming and
talking to her of the brood that under their care should grow into
wonderful reliant men and women. When Lewis, the talented sales manager of
the Edwards Arms Company, got the business of a Kansas City jobber, he
smiled, wrote a sharp letter to his man in that territory, and went for an
afternoon of golf with Sue. He had completely and wholly accepted Sue's
conception of life. "We have wealth for any emergency," he said to
himself, "and we will live our lives for service to mankind through the
children that will presently come into our house."

After their marriage Sam found that Sue, for all her apparent coldness and
indifference, had in Chicago, as in the northern woods, her own little
circle of men and women. Some of these people Sam had met during the
engagement, and now they began gradually coming to the house for an
evening with the McPhersons. Sometimes there would be several of them for
a quiet dinner at which there was much good talk, and after which Sue and
Sam sat for half the night, continuing some vein of thought brought to
them. Among the people who came to them, Sam shone resplendent. In some
indefinable way he thought they paid court to him and the thought
flattered him immensely. The college professor who had talked brilliantly
through an evening turned to Sam for approval of his conclusions, a writer
of tales of cowboy life asked him to help him over a difficulty in the
stock market, and a tall black-haired painter paid him the rare compliment
of repeating one of Sam's remarks as his own. It was as though, in spite
of their talk, they thought him the most gifted of them all, and for a
time he was puzzled by their attitude. Jack Prince came, sat at one of the
dinner parties, and explained.

"You have got what they want and cannot get--the money," he said.

After the evening when Sue told him the great news they gave a dinner. It
was a sort of welcoming party for the coming guest, and, while the people
at the table ate and talked, Sue and Sam, from opposite ends of the table,
lifted high their glasses and, looking into each other's eyes, drank off
the health of him who was to come, the first of the great family, the
family that was to have two lives lived for its success.

At the table sat Colonel Tom with his broad white shirt front, his white,
pointed beard, and his grandiloquent flow of talk; at Sue's side sat Jack
Prince, pausing in his open admiration of Sue to cast an eye on the
handsome New York girl at Sam's end of the table or to puncture, with a
flash of his terse common sense, some balloon of theory launched by
Williams of the University, who sat on the other side of Sue; the artist,
who hoped for a commission to paint Colonel Tom, sat opposite him
bewailing the dying out of fine old American families; and a serious-faced
little German scientist sat beside Colonel Tom smiling as the artist
talked. The man, Sam fancied, was laughing at them both, perhaps at all of
them. He did not mind. He looked at the scientist and at the other faces
up and down the table and then at Sue. He saw her directing and leading
the talk; he saw the play of muscles about her strong neck and the fine
firmness of her straight little body, and his eyes grew moist and a lump
came into his throat at the thought of the secret that lay between them.

And then his mind ran back to another night in Caxton when first he sat
eating among strange people at Freedom Smith's table. He saw again the
tomboy girl and the sturdy boy and the lantern swinging in Freedom's hand
in the close little stable; he saw the absurd housepainter trying to blow
the bugle in the street; and the mother talking to her boy of death
through the summer evening; the fat foreman making the record of his loves
on the walls of his room, the narrow-faced commission man rubbing his
hands before a group of Greek hucksters, and then this--this home with its
safety and its secret high aim and him sitting there at the head of it
all. Like the novelist, it seemed to him that he should admire and bow his
head before the romance of destiny. He thought his station, his wife, his
country, his end in life, when rightly seen, the very apex of life on the
earth, and to him in his pride it seemed that he was in some way the
master and maker of it all.




CHAPTER VII


Late one evening, some weeks after the McPhersons had given the dinner
party in secret celebration of the future arrival of what was to be the
first of the great family, they came together down the steps of a north
side house to their waiting carriage. They had spent, Sam thought, a
delightful evening. The Grovers were people of whose friendship he was
particularly proud and since his marriage with Sue he had taken her often
for an evening to the house of the venerable surgeon. Doctor Grover was a
scholar, a man of note in the medical world, and a rapid and absorbing
talker and thinker on any subject that aroused his interest. A certain
youthful enthusiasm in his outlook on life had attracted to him the
devotion of Sue, who, since meeting him through Sam, had counted him a
marked addition to their little group of friends. His wife, a white-
haired, plump little woman, was, though apparently somewhat diffident, in
reality his intellectual equal and companion, and Sue in a quiet way had
taken her as a model in her own effort toward complete wifehood.

During the evening, spent in a rapid exchange of opinions and ideas
between the two men, Sue had sat in silence. Once when he looked at her
Sam thought that he had surprised an annoyed look in her eyes and was
puzzled by it. During the remainder of the evening her eyes refused to
meet his and she looked instead at the floor, a flush mounting her cheeks.

At the door of the carriage Frank, Sue's coachman, stepped on the hem of
her gown and tore it. The tear was slight, the incident Sam thought
entirely unavoidable, and as much due to a momentary clumsiness on the
part of Sue as to the awkwardness of Frank. The man had for years been a
loyal servant and a devoted admirer of Sue's.

Sam laughed and taking Sue by the arm started to help her in at the
carriage door.

"Too much gown for an athlete," he said, pointlessly.

In a flash Sue turned and faced the coachman.

"Awkward brute," she said, through her teeth.

Sam stood on the sidewalk dumb with astonishment as Frank turned and
climbed to his seat without waiting to close the carriage door. He felt as
he might have felt had he, as a boy, heard profanity from the lips of his
mother. The look in Sue's eyes as she turned them on Frank struck him like
a blow and in a moment his whole carefully built-up conception of her and
of her character had been shaken. He had an impulse to slam the carriage
door after her and walk home.

They drove home in silence, Sam feeling as though he rode beside a new and
strange being. In the light of passing street lamps he could see her face
held straight ahead and her eyes staring stonily at the curtain in front.
He didn't want to reproach her; he wanted to take hold of her arm and
shake her. "I should like to take the whip from in front of Frank's seat
and give her a sound beating," he told himself.

At the house Sue jumped out of the carriage and, running past him in at
the door, closed it after her. Frank drove off toward the stables and when
Sam went into the house he found Sue standing half way up the stairs
leading to her room and waiting for him.

"I presume you do not know that you have been openly insulting me all
evening," she cried. "Your beastly talk there at the Grovers--it was
unbearable--who are these women? Why parade your past life before me?"

Sam said nothing. He stood at the foot of the stairs and looked up at her
and then, turning, just as she, running up the stairs, slammed the door of
her own room, he went into the library. A wood fire burned in the grate
and he sat down and lighted his pipe. He did not try to think the thing
out. He felt that he was in the presence of a lie and that the Sue who had
lived in his mind and in his affections no longer existed, that in her
place there was this other woman, this woman who had insulted her own
servant and had perverted and distorted the meaning of his talk during the
evening.

Sitting by the fire filling and refilling his pipe, Sam went carefully
over every word, gesture, and incident of the evening at the Grovers and
could get hold of no part of it that he thought might in fairness serve as
an excuse for the outburst. In the upper part of the house he could hear
Sue moving restlessly about and he had satisfaction in the thought that
her mind was punishing her for so strange a seizure. He and Grover had
perhaps been somewhat carried away, he told himself; they had talked of
marriage and its meaning and had both declared somewhat hotly against the
idea that the loss of virginity in women was in any sense a bar to
honourable marriage, but he had said nothing that he thought could have
been twisted into an insult to Sue or to Mrs. Grover. He had thought the
talk rather good and clearly thought out and had come out of the house
exhilarated and secretly preening himself with the thought that he had
talked unusually forcefully and well. In any event what had been said had
been said before in Sue's presence and he thought that he could remember
her having, in the past, expressed similar ideas with enthusiasm.

Hour after hour he sat in the chair before the dying fire. He dozed and
his pipe dropped from his hand and fell upon the stone hearth. A kind of
dumb misery and anger was in him as over and over endlessly his mind kept
reviewing the events of the evening.

"What has made her think she can do that to me?" he kept asking himself.

He remembered certain strange silences and hard looks from her eyes during
the past weeks, silences and looks that in the light of the events of the
evening became pregnant with meaning.

"She has a temper, a beast of a temper. Why shouldn't she have been square
and told me?" he asked himself.

The clock had struck three when the library door opened quietly and Sue,
clad in a dressing gown through which the new roundness of her lithe
little figure was plainly apparent, came into the room. She ran across to
him and putting her head down on his knee wept bitterly.

"Oh, Sam!" she said, "I think I am going insane. I have been hating you as
I have not hated since I was an evil-tempered child. A thing I worked
years to suppress in me has come back. I have been hating myself and the
baby. For days I have been fighting the feeling in me, and now it has come
out and perhaps you have begun hating me. Can you love me again? Will you
ever forget the meanness and the cheapness of it? You and poor innocent
Frank--Oh, Sam, the devil was in me!"

Reaching down, Sam took her into his arms and cuddled her like a child. A
story he had heard of the vagaries of women at such times came back to him
and was as a light illuminating the darkness of his mind.

"I understand now," he said. "It is a part of the burden you carry for us
both."

For some weeks after the outbreak at the carriage door events ran smoothly
in the McPherson house. One day as he stood in the stable door Frank came
round the corner of the house and, looking up sheepishly from under his
cap, said to Sam: "I understand about the missus. It is the baby coming.
We have had four of them at our house," and Sam, nodding his head, turned
and began talking rapidly of his plans to replace the carriages with
automobiles.

But in the house, in spite of the clearing up of the matter of Sue's
ugliness at the Grovers, a subtle change had taken place in the
relationship of the two. Although they were together facing the first of
the events that were to be like ports-of-call in the great voyage of their
lives, they were not facing it with the same mutual understanding and
kindly tolerance with which they had faced smaller things in the past--a
disagreement over the method of shooting a rapid in a river or the
entertainment of an undesirable guest. The inclination to fits of temper
loosens and disarranges all the little wires of life. The tune will not
get itself played. One stands waiting for the discord, strained, missing
the harmony. It was so with Sam. He began feeling that he must keep a
check upon his tongue and that things of which they had talked with great
freedom six months earlier now annoyed and irritated his wife when brought
into an after-dinner discussion. To Sam, who, during his life with Sue,
had learned the joy of free, open talk upon any subject that came into his
mind and whose native interest in life and in the motives of men and women
had blossomed in the large leisure and independence of the last year, this
was trying. It was, he thought, like trying to hold free and open
communion with the people of an orthodox family, and he fell into a habit
of prolonged silences, a habit that later, he found, once formed,
unbelievably hard to break.

One day in the office a situation arose that seemed to demand Sam's
presence in Boston on a certain date. For months he had been carrying on a
trade war with some of the eastern manufacturers in his line and an
opportunity for the settlement of the trouble in a way advantageous to
himself had, he thought, arisen. He wanted to handle the matter himself
and went home to explain to Sue. It was at the end of a day when nothing
had occurred to irritate her and she agreed with him that he should not be
compelled to trust so important a matter to another.

"I am no child, Sam. I will take care of myself," she said, laughing.

Sam wired his New York man asking him to make the arrangements for the
meeting in Boston and picked up a book to spend the evening reading aloud
to her.

And then, coming home the next evening he found her in tears and when he
tried to laugh away her fears she flew into a black fit of anger and ran
out of the room.

Sam went to the 'phone and called his New York man, thinking to instruct
him in regard to the conference in Boston and to give up his own plans for
the trip. When he had got his man on the wire, Sue, who had been standing
outside the door, rushed in and put her hand over the mouthpiece of the
'phone.

"Sam! Sam!" she cried. "Do not give up the trip! Scold me! Beat me! Do
anything, but do not let me go on making a fool of myself and destroying
your peace of mind! I shall be miserable if you stay at home because of
what I have said!"

Over the 'phone came the insistent voice of Central and putting her hand
aside Sam talked to his man, letting the engagement stand and making some
detail of the conference answer as his need of calling.

Again Sue was repentant and again after her tears they sat before the fire
until his train time, talking like lovers.

To Buffalo in the morning came a wire from her.

"Come back. Let business go. Cannot stand it," she had wired.

While he sat reading the wire the porter brought another.

"Please, Sam, pay no attention to any wire from me. I am all right and
only half a fool."

Sam was irritated. "It is deliberate pettiness and weakness," he thought,
when an hour later the porter brought another wire demanding his immediate
return. "The situation calls for drastic action and perhaps one good
stinging reproof will stop it for all time."

Going into the buffet car he wrote a long letter calling her attention to
the fact that a certain amount of freedom of action was due him, and
saying that he intended to act upon his own judgment in the future and not
upon her impulses.

Having begun to write Sam went on and on. He was not interrupted, no
shadow crossed the face of his beloved to tell him he was hurting and he
said all that was in his mind to say. Little sharp reproofs that had come
into his mind but that had been left unsaid now got themselves said and
when he had dumped his overloaded mind into the letter he sealed and
mailed it at a passing station.

Within an hour after the letter had left his hands Sam regretted it. He
thought of the little woman bearing the burden for them both, and things
Grover had told him of the unhappiness of women in her condition came back
to haunt his mind so that he wrote and sent off to her a wire asking her
not to read the letter he had mailed and assuring her that he would hurry
through the Boston conference and get back to her at once.

When Sam returned he knew that in an evil moment Sue had opened and read
the letter sent from the train and was surprised and hurt by the
knowledge. The act seemed like a betrayal. He said nothing, going about
his work with a troubled mind and watching with growing anxiety her
alternate fits of white anger and fearful remorse. He thought her growing
worse daily and became alarmed for her health.

And, then, after a talk with Grover he began to spend more and more time
with her, forcing her to take with him daily, long walks in the open air.
He tried valiantly to keep her mind fixed on cheerful things and went to
bed happy and relieved when a day ended that did not bring a stormy
passage between them.

There were days during that period when Sam thought himself near insanity.
With a light in her grey eyes that was maddening Sue would take up some
minor thing, a remark he had made or a passage he had quoted from some
book, and in a dead, level, complaining tone would talk of it until his
head reeled and his fingers ached from the gripping of his hands to keep
control of himself. After such a day he would steal off by himself and,
walking rapidly, would try through pure physical fatigue to force his mind
to give up the remembrance of the persistent, complaining voice. At times
he would give way to fits of anger and strew impotent oaths along the
silent street, or, in another mood, would mumble and talk to himself,
praying for strength and courage to keep his own head during the ordeal
through which he thought they were passing together. And when he returned
from such a walk and from such a struggle with himself it often occurred
that he would find her waiting in the arm chair before the fire in her
room, her mind clear and her little face wet with the tears of her
repentance.

And then the struggle ended. With Doctor Grover it had been arranged that
Sue should be taken to the hospital for the great event, and they drove
there hurriedly one night through the quiet streets, the recurring pains
gripping Sue and her hands clutching his. An exalted cheerfulness had hold
of them. Face to face with the actual struggle for the new life Sue was
transfigured. Her voice rang with triumph and her eyes glistened.

"I am going to do it," she cried; "my black fear is gone. I shall give you
a child--a man child. I shall succeed, my man Sam. You shall see. It will
be beautiful."

When the pain gripped she gripped at his hand, and a spasm of physical
sympathy ran through him. He felt helpless and ashamed of his
helplessness.

At the entrance to the hospital grounds she put her face down upon his
knees so that the hot tears ran through his hands.

"Poor, poor old Sam, it has been horrible for you."

At the hospital Sam walked up and down in the corridor through the
swinging doors at the end of which she had been taken. Every vestige of
regret for the trying months now lying behind had passed, and he paced up
and down the corridor feeling that he had come to one of those huge
moments when a man's brain, his grasp of affairs, his hopes and plans for
the future, all of the little details and trivialities of his life, halt,
and he waits anxious, breathless, expectant. He looked at a little clock
on a table at the end of the corridor, half expecting it to stop also and
wait with him. His marriage hour that had seemed so big and vital seemed
now, in the quiet corridor, with the stone floor and the silent white-
clad, rubber-shod nurses passing up and down and in the presence of this
greater event, to have shrunk enormously. He walked up and down peering at
the clock, looking at the swinging door and biting at the stem of his
empty pipe.

And then through the swinging door came Grover.

"We can get the child, Sam, but to get it we shall have to take a chance
with her. Do you want to do that? Do not wait. Decide."

Sam sprang past him toward the door.

"You bungler," he cried, and his voice rang through the long quiet
corridor. "You do not know what this means. Let me go."

Doctor Grover, catching him by the arm, swung him about. The two men stood
facing each other.

"You stay here," said the doctor, his voice remaining quiet and firm; "I
will attend to things. Your going in there would be pure folly now. Now
answer me--do you want to take the chance?"

"No! No!" Sam shouted. "No! I want her--Sue--alive and well, back through
that door."

A cold gleam came into his eyes and he shook his fist before the doctor's
face.

"Do not try deceiving me about this. By God, I will----"

Turning, Doctor Grover ran back through the swinging door leaving Sam
staring blankly at his back. A nurse, one whom he had seen in Doctor
Grover's office, came out of the door and taking his arm, walked beside
him up and down the corridor. Sam put his arm around her shoulder and
talked. An illusion that it was necessary to comfort her came to him.

"Do not worry," he said. "She will be all right. Grover will take care of
her. Nothing can happen to little Sue."

The nurse, a small, sweet-faced, Scotch woman, who knew and admired Sue,
wept. Some quality in his voice had touched the woman in her and the tears
ran in a little stream down her cheeks. Sam continued talking, the woman's
tears helping him to regain his grip upon himself.

"My mother is dead," he said, an old sorrow revisiting him. "I wish that
you, like Mary Underwood, would be a new mother to me."

When the time came that he could be taken to the room where Sue lay, his
self-possession had returned to him and his mind had begun blaming the
little dead stranger for the unhappiness of the past months and for the
long separation from what he thought was the real Sue. Outside the door of
the room into which she had been taken he stopped, hearing her voice, thin
and weak, talking to Grover.

"Unfit--Sue McPherson unfit," said the voice, and Sam thought it was
filled with an infinite weariness.

He ran through the door and dropped on his knees by her bed. She turned
her eyes to him smiling bravely.

"The next time we'll make it," she said.

The second child born to the young McPhersons arrived out of time. Again
Sam walked, this time through the corridor of his own house and without
the consoling presence of the sweet-faced Scotch woman, and again he shook
his head at Doctor Grover who came to him consoling and reassuring.

After the death of the second child Sue lay for months in bed. In his
arms, in her own room, she wept openly in the presence of Grover and the
nurses, crying out against her unfitness. For several days she refused to
see Colonel Tom, harbouring in her mind the notion that he was in some way
responsible for her physical inability to bear living children, and when
she got up from her bed, she remained for months white and listless but
grimly determined upon another attempt for the little life she so wanted
to feel in her arms.

During the days of her carrying the second baby she had again the fierce
ugly attacks of temper that had shattered Sam's nerves, but having learned
to understand, he went quietly about his work, trying as far as in him lay
to close his ears to the stinging, hurtful things she sometimes said; and
the third time, it was agreed between them that if they were again
unsuccessful they would turn their minds to other things.

"If we do not succeed this time we might as well count ourselves through
with each other for good," she said one day in one of the fits of cold
anger that were a part of child bearing with her.

That second night when Sam walked in the hospital corridor he was beside
himself. He felt like a young recruit called to face an unseen enemy and
to stand motionless and inactive in the presence of the singing death that
ran through the air. He remembered a story, told when he was a child by a
fellow soldier who had come to visit his father, of the prisoners at
Andersonville creeping in the darkness past armed sentries to a little
pool of stagnant water beyond the dead line, and felt that he too was
creeping unarmed and helpless in the neighbourhood of death. In a
conference at his house between the three some weeks before, it had been
decided, after tearful insistence on the part of Sue and a stand on the
part of Grover, who declared that he would not remain on the case unless
permitted to use his own judgment, that an operation should be performed.

"Take the chances that need be taken," Sam had said to Grover after the
conference; "she will never stand another defeat. Give her the child."

In the corridor it seemed to Sam that hours had passed and still he stood
motionless waiting. His feet felt cold and he had the impression that they
were wet although the night was dry and a moon shone outside. When, from a
distant part of the hospital, a groan reached his ears he shook with
fright and had an inclination to cry out. Two young interns clad in white
passed.

"Old Grover is doing a Caesarian section," said one of them; "he is
getting out of date. Hope he doesn't bungle it."

In Sam's ears rang the remembrance of Sue's voice, the Sue who that first
time had gone into the room behind the swinging doors with the determined
smile on her face. He thought he could see again the white face looking up
from the wheeled cot on which they had taken her through the door.

"I am afraid, Dr. Grover--I am afraid I am unfit," he had heard her say as
the door closed.

And then Sam did a thing for which he cursed himself the rest of his life.
On an impulse, and maddened by the intolerable waiting, he walked to the
swinging doors and, pushing them open, stepped into the operating room
where Grover was at work upon Sue.

The room was long and narrow, with floors, walls and ceiling of white
cement. A great glaring light, suspended from the ceiling, threw its rays
directly down on a white-clad figure lying on a white metal operating
table. On the walls of the room were other glaring lights set in shining
glass reflectors. And, here and there through an intense, expectant
atmosphere, moved and stood silently a group of men and women, faceless,
hairless, with only their strangely vivid eyes showing through the white
masks that covered their faces.

Sam, standing motionless by the door, looked about with wild, half-seeing
eyes. Grover worked rapidly and silently, taking from time to time little
shining instruments from a swinging table close at his hand. The nurse
standing beside him looked up toward the light and began calmly threading
a needle. And in a white basin on a little stand at the side of the room
lay the last of Sue's tremendous efforts toward new life, the last of
their dreams of the great family.

Sam closed his eyes and fell. His head, striking against the wall, aroused
him and he struggled to his feet.

Without stopping his work, Grover began swearing.

"Damn it, man, get out of here."

Sam groped with his hand for the door. One of the white-clad, ghoulish
figures started toward him. And then with his head reeling and his eyes
closed he backed through the door and, running along the corridor and down
a flight of broad stairs, reached the open air and darkness. He had no
doubt of Sue's death.

"She is gone," he muttered, hurrying bareheaded along the deserted
streets.

Through street after street he ran. Twice he came out upon the shores of
the lake, and, then turning, went back into the heart of the city through
streets bathed in the warm moonlight. Once he turned quickly at a corner
and stepping into a vacant lot stood behind a high board fence as a
policeman strolled along the street. Into his head came the idea that he
had killed Sue and that the blue-clad figure walking with heavy tread on
the stone pavement was seeking him to take him back to where she lay white
and lifeless. Again he stopped, before a little frame drugstore on a
corner, and sitting down on the steps before it cursed God openly and
defiantly like an angry boy defying his father. Some instinct led him to
look at the sky through the tangle of telegraph wires overhead.

"Go on and do what you dare!" he cried. "I will not follow you now. I
shall never try to find you after this."

Presently he began laughing at himself for the instinct that had led him
to look at the sky and to shout out his defiance and, getting up, wandered
on. In his wanderings he came to a railroad track where a freight train
groaned and rattled over a crossing. When he came up to it he jumped upon
an empty coal car, falling as he climbed, and cutting his face upon the
sharp pieces of coal that lay scattered about the bottom of the car.

The train ground along slowly, stopping occasionally, the engine shrieking
hysterically.

After a time he got out of the car and dropped to the ground. On all sides
of him were marshes, the long rank marsh grasses rolling and tossing in
the moonlight. When the train had passed he followed it, walking
stumblingly along. As he walked, following the blinking lights at the end
of the train, he thought of the scene in the hospital and of Sue lying
dead for that--that ping livid and shapeless on the table under the
lights.

Where the solid ground ran up to the tracks Sam sat down under a tree.
Peace came over him. "This is the end of things," he thought, and was like
a tired child comforted by its mother. He thought of the sweet-faced nurse
who had walked with him that other time in the corridor of the hospital
and who had wept because of his fears, and then of the night when he had
felt the throat of his father between his fingers in the squalid little
kitchen. He ran his hands along the ground. "Good old ground," he said. A
sentence came into his mind followed by the figure of John Telfer
striding, stick in hand, along a dusty road. "Here is spring come and time
to plant out flowers in the grass," he said aloud. His face felt swollen
and sore from the fall in the freight car and he lay down on the ground
under a tree and slept.

When he woke it was morning and grey clouds were drifting across the sky.
Within sight, down a road, a trolley car went past into the city. Before
him, in the midst of the marsh, lay a low lake, and a raised walk, with
boats tied to the posts on which it stood, ran down to the water. He went
down the walk, bathed his bruised face in the water, and boarding a car
went back into the city.

In the morning air a new thought took possession of him. The wind ran
along a dusty road beside the car track, picking up little handfuls of
dust and playfully throwing them about. He had a strained, eager feeling
like some one listening for a faint call out of the distance.

"To be sure," he thought, "I know what it is, it is my wedding day. I am
to marry Sue Rainey to-day."

At the house he found Grover and Colonel Tom standing in the breakfast
room. Grover looked at his swollen, distorted face. His voice trembled.

"Poor devil!" he said. "You have had a night!"

Sam laughed and slapped Colonel Tom on the shoulder.

"We will have to begin getting ready," he said. "The wedding is at ten.
Sue will be getting anxious."

Grover and Colonel Tom took him by the arm and began leading him up the
stairs, Colonel Tom weeping like a woman.

"Silly old fool," thought Sam.

When, two weeks later, he again opened his eyes to consciousness Sue sat
beside his bed in a reclining chair, her little thin white hand in his.

"Get the baby!" he cried, believing anything possible. "I want to see the
baby!"

She laid her head down on the pillow.

"It was gone when you saw it," she said, and put an arm about his neck.

When the nurse came back she found them, their heads together upon the
pillow, crying weakly like two tired children.




CHAPTER VIII


The blow given the plan of life so carefully thought out and so eagerly
accepted by the young McPhersons threw them back upon themselves. For
several years they had been living upon a hill top, taking themselves very
seriously and more than a little preening themselves with the thought that
they were two very unusual and thoughtful people engaged upon a worthy and
ennobling enterprise. Sitting in their corner immersed in admiration of
their own purposes and in the thoughts of the vigorous, disciplined, new
life they were to give the world by the combined efficiency of their two
bodies and minds they were, at a word and a shake of the head from Doctor
Grover, compelled to remake the outline of their future together.

All about them the rush of life went on, vast changes were impending in
the industrial life of the people, cities were doubling and tripling their
population, a war was being fought, and the flag of their country flew in
the ports of strange seas, while American boys pushed their way through
the tangled jungles of strange lands carrying in their hands Rainey-
Whittaker rifles. And in a huge stone house, set in a broad expanse of
green lawns near the shores of Lake Michigan, Sam McPherson sat looking at
his wife, who in turn looked at him. He was trying, as she also was
trying, to adjust himself to the cheerful acceptance of their new prospect
of a childless life.

Looking at Sue across the dinner table or seeing her straight, wiry body
astride a horse riding beside him through the parks, it seemed to Sam
unbelievable that a childless womanhood was ever to be her portion, and
more than once he had an inclination to venture again upon an effort for
the success of their hopes. But when he remembered her still white face
that night in the hospital, her bitter, haunting cry of defeat, he turned
with a shudder from the thought, feeling that he could not go with her
again through that ordeal; that he could not again allow her to look
forward through weeks and months toward the little life that never came to
lie upon her breast or to laugh up into her face.

And yet Sam, son of that Jane McPherson who had won the admiration of the
men of Caxton by her ceaseless efforts to keep her family afloat and clean
handed, could not sit idly by, living upon the income of his own and Sue's
money. The stirring, forward-moving world called to him; he looked about
him at the broad, significant movements in business and finance, at the
new men coming into prominence and apparently finding a way for the
expression of new big ideas, and felt his youth stirring in him and his
mind reaching out to new projects and new ambitions.

Given the necessity for economy and a hard long-drawn-out struggle for a
livelihood and competence, Sam could conceive of living his life with Sue
and deriving something like gratification from just her companionship, and
her partnership in his efforts--here and there during the waiting years he
had met men who had found such gratification--a foreman in the shops or a
tobacconist from whom he bought his cigars--but for himself he felt that
he had gone with Sue too far upon another road to turn that way now with
anything like mutual zeal or interest. At bottom, his mind did not run
strongly toward the idea of the love of women as an end in life; he had
loved, and did love, Sue with something approaching religious fervour, but
the fervour was more than half due to the ideas she had given him and to
the fact that with him she was to have been the instrument for the
realisation of those ideas. He was a man with children in his loins and he
had given up his struggles for business eminence for the sake of preparing
himself for a kind of noble fatherhood of children, many children, strong
children, fit gifts to the world for two exceptionally favoured lives. In
all of his talks with Sue this idea had been present and dominant. He had
looked about him and in the arrogance of his youth and in the pride of his
good body and mind had condemned all childless marriages as a selfish
waste of good lives. With her he had agreed that such lives were without
point and purpose. Now he remembered that in the days of her audacity and
daring she had more than once expressed the hope that in case of a
childless issue to their marriage one or the other of them would have the
courage to cut the knot that tied them and venture into another effort at
right living at any cost.

In the months after Sue's last recovery, and during the long evenings, as
they sat together or walked under the stars in the park, the thought of
these talks was often in Sam's mind and he found himself beginning to
speculate on her present attitude and to wonder how bravely she would meet
the idea of a separation. In the end he decided that no such thought was
in her mind, that face to face with the tremendous actuality she clung to
him with a new dependence, and a new need of his companionship. The
conviction of the absolute necessity of children as a justification for a
man and woman living together had, he thought, burned itself more deeply
into his brain than into hers; to him it clung, coming back again and
again to his mind, causing him to turn here and there restlessly, making
readjustments, seeking new light. The old gods being dead he sought new
gods.

In the meantime he sat in his house facing his wife, losing himself in the
books recommended to him years before by Janet, thinking his own thoughts.
Often in the evening he would look up from his book or from his
preoccupied staring at the fire to find her eyes looking at him.

"Talk, Sam; talk," she would say; "do not sit there thinking."

Or at another time she would come to his room at night and putting her
head down on the pillow beside his would spend hours planning, weeping,
begging him to give her again his love, his old fervent, devoted love.

This Sam tried earnestly and honestly to do, going with her for long walks
when the new call, the business had begun to make to him, would have kept
him at his desk, reading aloud to her in the evening, urging her to shake
off her old dreams and to busy herself with new work and new interests.

Through the days in the office he went in a kind of half stupor. An old
feeling of his boyhood coming back to him, it seemed to him, as it had
seemed when he walked aimlessly through the streets of Caxton after the
death of his mother, that there remained something to be done, an
accounting to be made. Even at his desk with the clatter of typewriters in
his ears and the piles of letters demanding his attention, his mind
slipped back to the days of his courtship with Sue and to those days in
the north woods when life had beat strong within him, and every young,
wild thing, every new growth renewed the dream that filled his being.
Sometimes on the street, or walking in the park with Sue, the cries of
children at play cut across the sombre dulness of his mind and he shrank
from the sound and a kind of bitter resentment took possession of him.
When he looked covertly at Sue she talked of other things, apparently
unconscious of his thoughts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sue looked at him doubtfully.

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

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

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

A flush arose to her cheeks and her eyes gleamed.

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

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

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

Sam put a hand upon her shoulder.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Morrison laughed as he read it aloud.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The colonel, le