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The Project Gutenberg EBook of Windy McPherson's Son, by Sherwood Anderson

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Title: Windy McPherson's Son

Author: Sherwood Anderson

Release Date: February, 2005  [EBook #7443]
[This file was first posted on April 30, 2003]

Edition: 10

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, WINDY MCPHERSON'S SON ***




Anne Soulard, Eric Eldred, John R. Bilderback, and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team



WINDY MCPHERSON'S SON

BY

SHERWOOD ANDERSON




TO THE LIVING MEN AND WOMEN OF MY OWN MIDDLE WESTERN HOME TOWN
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED




WINDY MCPHERSON'S SON




BOOK I


CHAPTER I


At the beginning of the long twilight of a summer evening, Sam McPherson,
a tall big-boned boy of thirteen, with brown hair, black eyes, and an
amusing little habit of tilting his chin in the air as he walked, came
upon the station platform of the little corn-shipping town of Caxton in
Iowa. It was a board platform, and the boy walked cautiously, lifting his
bare feet and putting them down with extreme deliberateness on the hot,
dry, cracked planks. Under one arm he carried a bundle of newspapers. A
long black cigar was in his hand.

In front of the station he stopped; and Jerry Donlin, the baggage-man,
seeing the cigar in his hand, laughed, and slowly drew the side of his
face up into a laboured wink.

"What is the game to-night, Sam?" he asked.

Sam stepped to the baggage-room door, handed him the cigar, and began
giving directions, pointing into the baggage-room, intent and business-
like in the face of the Irishman's laughter. Then, turning, he walked
across the station platform to the main street of the town, his eyes bent
on the ends of his fingers on which he was making computations with his
thumb. Jerry looked after him, grinning so that his red gums made a splash
of colour on his bearded face. A gleam of paternal pride lit his eyes and
he shook his head and muttered admiringly. Then, lighting the cigar, he
went down the platform to where a wrapped bundle of newspapers lay against
the building, under the window of the telegraph office, and taking it in
his arm disappeared, still grinning, into the baggage-room.

Sam McPherson walked down Main Street, past the shoe store, the bakery,
and the candy store kept by Penny Hughes, toward a group lounging at the
front of Geiger's drug store. Before the door of the shoe store he paused
a moment, and taking a small note-book from his pocket ran his finger down
the pages, then shaking his head continued on his way, again absorbed in
doing sums on his fingers.

Suddenly, from among the men by the drug store, a roaring song broke the
evening quiet of the street, and a voice, huge and guttural, brought a
smile to the boy's lips:

  "He washed the windows and he swept the floor,
  And he polished up the handle of the big front door.
  He polished that handle so carefullee,
  That now he's the ruler of the queen's navee."

The singer, a short man with grotesquely wide shoulders, wore a long
flowing moustache, and a black coat, covered with dust, that reached to
his knees. He held a smoking briar pipe in his hand, and with it beat time
for a row of men sitting on a long stone under the store window and
pounding on the sidewalk with their heels to make a chorus for the song.
Sam's smile broadened into a grin as he looked at the singer, Freedom
Smith, a buyer of butter and eggs, and past him at John Telfer, the
orator, the dandy, the only man in town, except Mike McCarthy, who kept
his trousers creased. Among all the men of Caxton, Sam most admired John
Telfer and in his admiration had struck upon the town's high light. Telfer
loved good clothes and wore them with an air, and never allowed Caxton to
see him shabbily or indifferently dressed, laughingly declaring that it
was his mission in life to give tone to the town.

John Telfer had a small income left him by his father, once a banker in
the town, and in his youth he had gone to New York to study art, and later
to Paris; but lacking ability or industry to get on had come back to
Caxton where he had married Eleanor Millis, a prosperous milliner. They
were the most successful married pair in Caxton, and after years of life
together they were still in love; were never indifferent to each other,
and never quarrelled; Telfer treated his wife with as much consideration
and respect as though she were a sweetheart, or a guest in his house, and
she, unlike most of the wives in Caxton, never ventured to question his
goings and comings, but left him free to live his own life in his own way
while she attended to the millinery business.

At the age of forty-five John Telfer was a tall, slender, fine looking
man, with black hair and a little black pointed beard, and with something
lazy and care-free in his every movement and impulse. Dressed in white
flannels, with white shoes, a jaunty cap upon his head, eyeglasses hanging
from a gold chain, and a cane lightly swinging from his hand, he made a
figure that might have passed unnoticed on the promenade before some
fashionable summer hotel, but that seemed a breach of the laws of nature
when seen on the streets of a corn-shipping town in Iowa. And Telfer was
aware of the extraordinary figure he cut; it was a part of his programme
of life. Now as Sam approached he laid a hand on Freedom Smith's shoulder
to check the song, and, with his eyes twinkling with good-humour, began
thrusting with his cane at the boy's feet.

"He will never be ruler of the queen's navee," he declared, laughing and
following the dancing boy about in a wide circle. "He is a little mole
that works underground intent upon worms. The trick he has of tilting up
his nose is only his way of smelling out stray pennies. I have it from
Banker Walker that he brings a basket of them into the bank every day. One
of these days he will buy the town and put it into his vest pocket."

Circling about on the stone sidewalk and dancing to escape the flying
cane, Sam dodged under the arm of Valmore, a huge old blacksmith with
shaggy clumps of hair on the back of his hands, and sought refuge between
him and Freedom Smith. The blacksmith's hand stole out and lay upon the
boy's shoulder. Telfer, his legs spread apart and the cane hooked upon his
arm, began rolling a cigarette; Geiger, a yellow skinned man with fat
cheeks and with hands clasped over his round paunch, smoked a black cigar,
and as he sent each puff into the air, grunted forth his satisfaction with
life. He was wishing that Telfer, Freedom Smith, and Valmore, instead of
moving on to their nightly nest at the back of Wildman's grocery, would
come into his place for the evening. He thought he would like to have the
three of them there night after night discussing the doings of the world.

Quiet once more settled down upon the sleepy street. Over Sam's shoulder,
Valmore and Freedom Smith talked of the coming corn crop and the growth
and prosperity of the country.

"Times are getting better about here, but the wild things are almost
gone," said Freedom, who in the winter bought hides and pelts.

The men sitting on the stone beneath the window watched with idle interest
Telfer's labours with paper and tobacco. "Young Henry Kerns has got
married," observed one of them, striving to make talk. "He has married a
girl from over Parkertown way. She gives lessons in painting--china
painting--kind of an artist, you know."

An ejaculation of disgust broke from Telfer: his fingers trembled and the
tobacco that was to have been the foundation of his evening smoke rained
on the sidewalk.

"An artist!" he exclaimed, his voice tense with excitement. "Who said
artist? Who called her that?" He glared fiercely about. "Let us have an
end to this blatant misuse of fine old words. To say of one that he is an
artist is to touch the peak of praise."

Throwing his cigarette paper after the scattered tobacco he thrust one
hand into his trouser pocket. With the other he held the cane, emphasising
his points by ringing taps upon the pavement. Geiger, taking the cigar
between his fingers, listened with open mouth to the outburst that
followed. Valmore and Freedom Smith dropped their conversation and with
broad smiles upon their faces gave attention, and Sam McPherson, his eyes
round with wonder and admiration, felt again the thrill that always ran
through him under the drum beats of Telfer's eloquence.

"An artist is one who hungers and thirsts after perfection, not one who
dabs flowers upon plates to choke the gullets of diners," declared Telfer,
setting himself for one of the long speeches with which he loved to
astonish the men of Caxton, and glaring down at those seated upon the
stone. "It is the artist who, among all men, has the divine audacity. Does
he not hurl himself into a battle in which is engaged against him all of
the accumulative genius of the world?"

Pausing, he looked about for an opponent upon whom he might pour the flood
of his eloquence, but on all sides smiles greeted him. Undaunted, he
rushed again to the charge.

"A business man--what is he?" he demanded. "He succeeds by outwitting the
little minds with which he comes in contact. A scientist is of more
account--he pits his brains against the dull unresponsiveness of inanimate
matter and a hundredweight of black iron he makes do the work of a hundred
housewives. But an artist tests his brains against the greatest brains of
all times; he stands upon the peak of life and hurls himself against the
world. A girl from Parkertown who paints flowers upon dishes to be called
an artist--ugh! Let me spew forth the thought! Let me cleanse my mouth! A
man should have a prayer upon his lips who utters the word artist!"

"Well, we can't all be artists and the woman can paint flowers upon dishes
for all I care," spoke up Valmore, laughing good naturedly. "We can't all
paint pictures and write books."

"We do not want to be artists--we do not dare to be," shouted Telfer,
whirling and shaking his cane at Valmore. "You have a misunderstanding of
the word."

He straightened his shoulders and threw out his chest and the boy standing
beside the blacksmith threw up his chin, unconsciously imitating the
swagger of the man.

"I do not paint pictures; I do not write books; yet am I an artist,"
declared Telfer, proudly. "I am an artist practising the most difficult of
all arts--the art of living. Here in this western village I stand and
fling my challenge to the world. 'On the lip of not the greatest of you,'
I cry, 'has life been more sweet.'"

He turned from Valmore to the men upon the stone.

"Make a study of my life," he commanded. "It will be a revelation to you.
With a smile I greet the morning; I swagger in the noontime; and in the
evening, like Socrates of old, I gather a little group of you benighted
villagers about me and toss wisdom into your teeth, striving to teach you
judgment in the use of great words."

"You talk an almighty lot about yourself, John," grumbled Freedom Smith,
taking his pipe from his mouth.

"The subject is complex, it is varied, it is full of charm," Telfer
answered, laughing.

Taking a fresh supply of tobacco and paper from his pocket, he rolled and
lighted a cigarette. His fingers no longer trembled. Flourishing his cane
he threw back his head and blew smoke into the air. He thought that in
spite of the roar of laughter that had greeted Freedom Smith's comment, he
had vindicated the honour of art and the thought made him happy.

To the newsboy, who had been leaning against the storefront lost in
admiration, it seemed that he had caught in Telfer's talk an echo of the
kind of talk that must go on among men in the big outside world. Had not
this Telfer travelled far? Had he not lived in New York and Paris? Without
understanding the sense of what had been said, Sam felt that it must be
something big and conclusive. When from the distance there came the shriek
of a locomotive, he stood unmoved, trying to comprehend the meaning of
Telfer's outburst over the lounger's simple statement.

"There's the seven forty-five," cried Telfer, sharply. "Is the war between
you and Fatty at an end? Are we going to lose our evening's diversion? Has
Fatty bluffed you out or are you growing rich and lazy like Papa Geiger
here?"

Springing from his place beside the blacksmith and grasping the bundle of
newspapers, Sam ran down the street, Telfer, Valmore, Freedom Smith and
the loungers following more slowly.

When the evening train from Des Moines stopped at Caxton, a blue-coated
train news merchant leaped hurriedly to the platform and began looking
anxiously about.

"Hurry, Fatty," rang out Freedom Smith's huge voice, "Sam's already half
through one car."

The young man called "Fatty" ran up and down the station platform. "Where
is that bundle of Omaha papers, you Irish loafer?" he shouted, shaking his
fist at Jerry Donlin who stood upon a truck at the front of the train, up-
ending trunks into the baggage car.

Jerry paused with a trunk dangling in mid-air. "In the baggage-room, of
course. Hurry, man. Do you want the kid to work the whole train?"

An air of something impending hung over the idlers upon the platform, the
train crew, and even the travelling men who began climbing off the train.
The engineer thrust his head out of the cab; the conductor, a dignified
looking man with a grey moustache, threw back his head and shook with
mirth; a young man with a suit-case in his hand and a long pipe in his
mouth ran to the door of the baggage-room, calling, "Hurry! Hurry, Fatty!
The kid is working the entire train. You won't be able to sell a paper."

The fat young man ran from the baggage-room to the platform and shouted
again to Jerry Donlin, who was now slowly pushing the empty truck along
the platform. From the train came a clear voice calling, "Latest Omaha
papers! Have your change ready! Fatty, the train newsboy, has fallen down
a well! Have your change ready, gentlemen!"

Jerry Donlin, followed by Fatty, again disappeared from sight. The
conductor, waving his hand, jumped upon the steps of the train. The
engineer pulled in his head and the train began to move.

The fat young man emerged from the baggage-room, swearing revenge upon the
head of Jerry Donlin. "There was no need to put it under a mail sack!" he
shouted, shaking his fist. "I'll be even with you for this."

Followed by the shouts of the travelling men and the laughter of the
idlers upon the platform he climbed upon the moving train and began
running from car to car. Off the last car dropped Sam McPherson, a smile
upon his lips, the bundle of newspapers gone, his pocket jingling with
coins. The evening's entertainment for the town of Caxton was at an end.

John Telfer, standing by the side of Valmore, waved his cane in the air
and began talking.

"Beat him again, by Gad!" he exclaimed. "Bully for Sam! Who says the
spirit of the old buccaneers is dead? That boy didn't understand what I
said about art, but he is an artist just the same!"




CHAPTER II


Windy McPherson, the father of the Caxton newsboy, Sam McPherson, had been
war touched. The civilian clothes that he wore caused an itching of the
skin. He could not forget that he had once been a sergeant in a regiment
of infantry and had commanded a company through a battle fought in ditches
along a Virginia country road. He chafed under the fact of his present
obscure position in life. Had he been able to replace his regimentals with
the robes of a judge, the felt hat of a statesman, or even with the night
stick of a village marshal life might have retained something of its
sweetness, but to have ended by becoming an obscure housepainter in a
village that lived by raising corn and by feeding that corn to red steers
--ugh!--the thought made him shudder. He looked with envy at the blue coat
and the brass buttons of the railroad agent; he tried vainly to get into
the Caxton Cornet Band; he got drunk to forget his humiliation and in the
end he fell to loud boasting and to the nursing of a belief within himself
that in truth not Lincoln nor Grant but he himself had thrown the winning
die in the great struggle. In his cups he said as much and the Caxton corn
grower, punching his neighbour in the ribs, shook with delight over the
statement.

When Sam was a twelve year old, barefooted boy upon the streets a kind of
backwash of the wave of glory that had swept over Windy McPherson in the
days of '61 lapped upon the shores of the Iowa village. That strange
manifestation called the A. P. A. movement brought the old soldier to a
position of prominence in the community. He founded a local branch of the
organisation; he marched at the head of a procession through the streets;
he stood on a corner and pointing a trembling forefinger to where the flag
on the schoolhouse waved beside the cross of Rome, shouted hoarsely, "See,
the cross rears itself above the flag! We shall end by being murdered in
our beds!"

But although some of the hard-headed, money-making men of Caxton joined
the movement started by the boasting old soldier and although for the
moment they vied with him in stealthy creepings through the streets to
secret meetings and in mysterious mutterings behind hands the movement
subsided as suddenly as it had begun and only left its leader more
desolate.

In the little house at the end of the street by the shores of Squirrel
Creek, Sam and his sister Kate regarded their father's warlike pretensions
with scorn. "The butter is low, father's army leg will ache to-night,"
they whispered to each other across the kitchen table.

Following her mother's example, Kate, a tall slender girl of sixteen and
already a bread winner with a clerkship in Winney's drygoods store,
remained silent under Windy's boasting, but Sam, striving to emulate them,
did not always succeed. There was now and then a rebellious muttering that
should have warned Windy. It had once burst into an open quarrel in which
the victor of a hundred battles withdrew defeated from the field. Windy,
half-drunk, had taken an old account book from a shelf in the kitchen, a
relic of his days as a prosperous merchant when he had first come to
Caxton, and had begun reading to the little family a list of names of men
who, he claimed, had been the cause of his ruin.

"There is Tom Newman, now," he exclaimed excitedly. "Owns a hundred acres
of good corn-growing land and won't pay for the harness on the backs of
his horses or for the ploughs in his barn. The receipt he has from me is
forged. I could put him in prison if I chose. To beat an old soldier!--to
beat one of the boys of '61!--it is shameful!"

"I have heard of what you owed and what men owed you; you had none the
worst of it," Sam protested coldly, while Kate held her breath and Jane
McPherson, at work over the ironing board in the corner, half turned and
looked silently at the man and the boy, the slightly increased pallor of
her long face the only sign that she had heard.

Windy had not pressed the quarrel. Standing for a moment in the middle of
the kitchen, holding the book in his hand, he looked from the pale silent
mother by the ironing board to the son now standing and staring at him,
and, throwing the book upon the table with a bang, fled the house. "You
don't understand," he had cried, "you don't understand the heart of a
soldier."

In a way the man was right. The two children did not understand the
blustering, pretending, inefficient old man. Having moved shoulder to
shoulder with grim, silent men to the consummation of great deeds Windy
could not get the flavour of those days out of his outlook upon life.
Walking half drunk in the darkness along the sidewalks of Caxton on the
evening of the quarrel the man became inspired. He threw back his
shoulders and walked with martial tread; he drew an imaginary sword from
its scabbard and waved it aloft; stopping, he aimed carefully at a body of
imaginary men who advanced yelling toward him across a wheatfield; he felt
that life in making him a housepainter in a farming village in Iowa and in
giving him an unappreciative son had been cruelly unfair; he wept at the
injustice of it.

The American Civil War was a thing so passionate, so inflaming, so vast,
so absorbing, it so touched to the quick the men and women of those
pregnant days that but a faint echo of it has been able to penetrate down
to our days and to our minds; no real sense of it has as yet crept into
the pages of a printed book; it yet wants its Thomas Carlyle; and in the
end we are put to the need of listening to old fellows boasting on our
village streets to get upon our cheeks the living breath of it. For four
years the men of American cities, villages and farms walked across the
smoking embers of a burning land, advancing and receding as the flame of
that universal, passionate, death-spitting thing swept down upon them or
receded toward the smoking sky-line. Is it so strange that they could not
come home and begin again peacefully painting houses or mending broken
shoes? A something in them cried out. It sent them to bluster and boast
upon the street corners. When people passing continued to think only of
their brick laying and of their shovelling of corn into cars, when the
sons of these war gods walking home at evening and hearing the vain
boastings of the fathers began to doubt even the facts of the great
struggle, a something snapped in their brains and they fell to chattering
and shouting their vain boastings to all as they looked hungrily about for
believing eyes.

When our own Thomas Carlyle comes to write of our Civil War he will make
much of our Windy McPhersons. He will see something big and pathetic in
their hungry search for auditors and in their endless war talk. He will go
filled with eager curiosity into little G. A. R. halls in the villages and
think of the men who coming there night after night, year after year, told
and re-told endlessly, monotonously, their story of battle.

Let us hope that in his fervour for the old fellows he will not fail to
treat tenderly the families of those veteran talkers; the families that
with their breakfasts and their dinners, by the fire at evening, through
fast day and feast day, at weddings and at funerals got again and again
endlessly, everlastingly this flow of war words. Let him reflect that
peaceful men in corn-growing counties do not by choice sleep among the
dogs of war nor wash their linen in the blood of their country's foe. Let
him, in his sympathy with the talkers, remember with kindness the heroism
of the listeners.

       *       *       *       *       *

On a summer day Sam McPherson sat on a box before Wildman's grocery lost
in thought. In his hand he held the little yellow account book and in this
he buried himself, striving to wipe from his consciousness a scene being
enacted before his eyes upon the street.

The realisation of the fact that his father was a confirmed liar and
braggart had for years cast a shadow over his days and the shadow had been
made blacker by the fact that in a land where the least fortunate can
laugh in the face of want he had more than once stood face to face with
poverty. He believed that the logical answer to the situation was money in
the bank and with all the ardour of his boy's heart he strove to realise
that answer. He wanted to be a money-maker and the totals at the foot of
the pages in the soiled yellow bankbook were the milestones that marked
the progress he had already made. They told him that the daily struggles
with Fatty, the long tramps through Caxton's streets on bleak winter
evenings, and the never-ending Saturday nights when crowds filled the
stores, the sidewalks, and the drinking places, and he worked among them
tirelessly and persistently were not without fruit.

Suddenly, above the murmur of men's voices on the street, his father's
voice rose loud and insistent. A block further down the street, leaning
against the door of Hunter's jewelry store, Windy talked at the top of his
lungs, pumping his arms up and down with the air of a man making a stump
speech.

"He is making a fool of himself," thought Sam, and returned to his
bankbook, striving in the contemplation of the totals at the foot of the
pages to shake off the dull anger that had begun to burn in his brain.
Glancing up again, he saw that Joe Wildman, son of the grocer and a boy of
his own age, had joined the group of men laughing and jeering at Windy.
The shadow on Sam's face grew heavier.

Sam had been at Joe Wildman's house; he knew the air of plenty and of
comfort that hung over it; the table piled high with meat and potatoes;
the group of children laughing and eating to the edge of gluttony; the
quiet, gentle father who amid the clamour and the noise did not raise his
voice, and the well-dressed, bustling, rosy-cheeked mother. As a contrast
to this scene he began to call up in his mind a picture of life in his own
home, getting a kind of perverted pleasure out of his dissatisfaction with
it. He saw the boasting, incompetent father telling his endless tales of
the Civil War and complaining of his wounds; the tall, stoop-shouldered,
silent mother with the deep lines in her long face, everlastingly at work
over her washtub among the soiled clothes; the silent, hurriedly-eaten
meals snatched from the kitchen table; and the long winter days when ice
formed upon his mother's skirts and Windy idled about town while the
little family subsisted upon bowls of cornmeal mush everlastingly
repeated.

Now, even from where he sat, he could see that his father was half gone in
drink, and knew that he was boasting of his part in the Civil War. "He is
either doing that or telling of his aristocratic family or lying about his
birthplace," he thought resentfully, and unable any longer to endure the
sight of what seemed to him his own degradation, he got up and went into
the grocery where a group of Caxton citizens stood talking to Wildman of a
meeting to be held that morning at the town hall.

Caxton was to have a Fourth of July celebration. The idea, born in the
heads of the few, had been taken up by the many. Rumours of it had run
through the streets late in May. It had been talked of in Geiger's drug
store, at the back of Wildman's grocery, and in the street before the New
Leland House. John Telfer, the town's one man of leisure, had for weeks
been going from place to place discussing the details with prominent men.
Now a mass meeting was to be held in the hall over Geiger's drug store and
to a man the citizens of Caxton had turned out for the meeting. The
housepainter had come down off his ladder, the clerks were locking the
doors of the stores, men went along the streets in groups bound for the
hall. As they went they shouted to each other. "The old town has woke up,"
they called.

On a corner by Hunter's jewelry store Windy McPherson leaned against a
building and harangued the passing crowd.

"Let the old flag wave," he shouted excitedly, "let the men of Caxton show
the true blue and rally to the old standards."

"That's right, Windy, expostulate with them," shouted a wit, and a roar of
laughter drowned Windy's reply.

Sam McPherson also went to the meeting in the hall. He came out of the
grocery store with Wildman and went along the street looking at the
sidewalk and trying not to see the drunken man talking in front of the
jewelry store. At the hall other boys stood in the stairway or ran up and
down the sidewalk talking excitedly, but Sam was a figure in the town's
life and his right to push in among the men was not questioned. He
squirmed through the mass of legs and secured a seat in a window ledge
where he could watch the men come in and find seats.

As Caxton's one newsboy Sam had got from his newspaper selling both a
living and a kind of standing in the town's life. To be a newsboy or a
bootblack in a small novel-reading American town is to make a figure in
the world. Do not all of the poor newsboys in the books become great men
and is not this boy who goes among us so industriously day after day
likely to become such a figure? Is it not a duty we of the town owe to
future greatness that we push him forward? So reasoned the men of Caxton
and paid a kind of court to the boy who sat on the window ledge of the
hall while the other boys of the town waited on the sidewalk below.

John Telfer was chairman of the mass meeting. He was always chairman of
public meetings in Caxton. The industrious silent men of position in the
town envied his easy, bantering style of public address, while pretending
to treat it with scorn. "He talks too much," they said, making a virtue of
their own inability with apt and clever words.

Telfer did not wait to be appointed chairman of the meeting, but went
forward, climbed the little raised platform at the end of the hall, and
usurped the chairmanship. He walked up and down on the platform bantering
with the crowd, answering gibes, calling to well-known men, getting and
giving keen satisfaction with his talent. When the hall was filled with
men he called the meeting to order, appointed committees and launched into
a harangue. He told of plans made to advertise the big day in other towns
and to get low railroad rates arranged for excursion parties. The
programme, he said, included a musical carnival with brass bands from
other towns, a sham battle by the military company at the fairgrounds,
horse races, speeches from the steps of the town hall, and fireworks in
the evening. "We'll show them a live town here," he declared, walking up
and down the platform and swinging his cane, while the crowd applauded and
shouted its approval.

When a call came for voluntary subscriptions to pay for the fun, the
audience quieted down. One or two men got up and started to go out,
grumbling that it was a waste of money. The fate of the celebration was on
the knees of the gods.

Telfer arose to the occasion. He called out the names of the departing,
and made jests at their expense so that they dropped back into their
chairs unable to face the roaring laughter of the crowd, and shouted to a
man at the back of the hall to close and bolt the door. Men began getting
up in various parts of the hall and calling out sums, Telfer repeating the
name and the amount in a loud voice to young Tom Jedrow, clerk in the
bank, who wrote them down in a book. When the amount subscribed did not
meet with his approval, he protested and the crowd backing him up forced
the increase he demanded. When a man did not rise, he shouted at him and
the man answered back an amount.

Suddenly in the hall a diversion arose. Windy McPherson emerged from the
crowd at the back of the hall and walked down the centre aisle to the
platform. He walked unsteadily straightening his shoulders and thrusting
out his chin. When he got to the front of the hall he took a roll of bills
from his pocket and threw it on the platform at the chairman's feet. "From
one of the boys of '61," he announced in a loud voice.

The crowd shouted and clapped its hands with delight as Telfer picked up
the bills and ran his finger over them. "Seventeen dollars from our hero,
the mighty McPherson," he shouted while the bank clerk wrote the name and
the amount in the book and the crowd continued to make merry over the
title given the drunken soldier by the chairman.

The boy on the window ledge slipped to the floor and stood with burning
cheeks behind the mass of men. He knew that at home his mother was doing a
family washing for Lesley, the shoe merchant, who had given five dollars
to the Fourth-of-July fund, and the resentment he had felt on seeing his
father talking to the crowd before the jewelry store blazed up anew.

After the taking of subscriptions, men in various parts of the hall began
making suggestions for added features for the great day. To some of the
speakers the crowd listened respectfully, at others they hooted. An old
man with a grey beard told a long rambling story of a Fourth-of-July
celebration of his boyhood. When voices interrupted he protested and shook
his fist in the air, pale with indignation.

"Oh, sit down, old daddy," shouted Freedom Smith and a murmur of applause
greeted this sensible suggestion.

Another man got up and began to talk. He had an idea. "We will have," he
said, "a bugler mounted on a white horse who will ride through the town at
dawn blowing the reveille. At midnight he will stand on the steps of the
town hall and blow taps to end the day."

The crowd applauded. The idea had caught their fancy and had instantly
taken a place in their minds as one of the real events of the day.

Again Windy McPherson emerged from the crowd at the back of the hall.
Raising his hand for silence he told the crowd that he was a bugler, that
he had been a regimental bugler for two years during the Civil War. He
said that he would gladly volunteer for the place.

The crowd shouted and John Telfer waved his hand. "The white horse for
you, McPherson," he said.

Sam McPherson wriggled along the wall and out at the now unbolted door. He
was filled with astonishment at his father's folly, and was still more
astonished at the folly of these other men in accepting his statement and
handing over the important place for the big day. He knew that his father
must have had some part in the war as he was a member of the G. A. R., but
he had no faith at all in the stories he had heard him relate of his
experiences in the war. Sometimes he caught himself wondering if there
ever had been such a war and thought that it must be a lie like everything
else in the life of Windy McPherson. For years he had wondered why some
sensible solid person like Valmore or Wildman did not rise, and in a
matter-of-fact way tell the world that no such thing as the Civil War had
ever been fought, that it was merely a figment in the minds of pompous old
men demanding unearned glory of their fellows. Now hurrying along the
street with burning cheeks, he decided that after all there must have been
such a war. He had had the same feeling about birthplaces and there could
be no doubt that people were born. He had heard his father claim as his
birthplace Kentucky, Texas, North Carolina, Louisiana and Scotland. The
thing had left a kind of defect in his mind. To the end of his life when
he heard a man tell the place of his birth he looked up suspiciously, and
a shadow of doubt crossed his mind.

From the mass meeting Sam went home to his mother and presented the case
bluntly. "The thing will have to be stopped," he declared, standing with
blazing eyes before her washtub. "It is too public. He can't blow a bugle;
I know he can't. The whole town will have another laugh at our expense."

Jane McPherson listened in silence to the boy's outburst, then, turning,
went back to rubbing clothes, avoiding his eyes.

With his hands thrust into his trousers pocket Sam stared sullenly at the
ground. A sense of justice told him not to press the matter, but as he
walked away from the washtub and out at the kitchen door, he hoped there
would be plain talk of the matter at supper time. "The old fool!" he
protested, addressing the empty street. "He is going to make a show of
himself again."

When Windy McPherson came home that evening, something in the eyes of the
silent wife, and the sullen face of the boy, startled him. He passed over
lightly his wife's silence but looked closely at his son. He felt that he
faced a crisis. In the emergency he was magnificent. With a flourish, he
told of the mass meeting, and declared that the citizens of Caxton had
arisen as one man to demand that he take the responsible place as official
bugler. Then, turning, he glared across the table at his son.

Sam, openly defiant, announced that he did not believe his father capable
of blowing a bugle.

Windy roared with amazement. He rose from the table declaring in a loud
voice that the boy had wronged him; he swore that he had been for two
years bugler on the staff of a colonel, and launched into a long story of
a surprise by the enemy while his regiment lay asleep in their tents, and
of his standing in the face of a storm of bullets and blowing his comrades
to action. Putting one hand on his forehead he rocked back and forth as
though about to fall, declaring that he was striving to keep back the
tears wrenched from him by the injustice of his son's insinuation and,
shouting so that his voice carried far down the street, he declared with
an oath that the town of Caxton should ring and echo with his bugling as
the sleeping camp had echoed with it that night in the Virginia wood. Then
dropping again into his chair, and resting his head upon his hand, he
assumed a look of patient resignation.

Windy McPherson was victorious. In the little house a great stir and
bustle of preparation arose. Putting on his white overalls and forgetting
for the time his honourable wounds the father went day after day to his
work as a housepainter. He dreamed of a new blue uniform for the great day
and in the end achieved the realisation of his dreams, not however without
material assistance from what was known in the house as "Mother's Wash
Money." And the boy, convinced by the story of the midnight attack in the
woods of Virginia, began against his judgment to build once more an old
dream of his father's reformation. Boylike, the scepticism was thrown to
the winds and he entered with zeal into the plans for the great day. As he
went through the quiet residence streets delivering the late evening
papers, he threw back his head and revelled in the thought of a tall blue-
clad figure on a great white horse passing like a knight before the gaping
people. In a fervent moment he even drew money from his carefully built-up
bank account and sent it to a firm in Chicago to pay for a shining new
bugle that would complete the picture he had in his mind. And when the
evening papers were distributed he hurried home to sit on the porch before
the house discussing with his sister Kate the honours that had alighted
upon their family.

       *       *       *       *       *

With the coming of dawn on the great day the three McPhersons hurried hand
in hand toward Main Street. In the street, on all sides of them, they saw
people coming out of houses rubbing their eyes and buttoning their coats
as they went along the sidewalk. All of Caxton seemed abroad.

In Main Street the people were packed on the sidewalk, and massed on the
curb and in the doorways of the stores. Heads appeared at windows, flags
waved from roofs or hung from ropes stretched across the street, and a
great murmur of voices broke the silence of the dawn.

Sam's heart beat so that he was hard put to it to keep back the tears from
his eyes. He thought with a gasp of the days of anxiety that had passed
when the new bugle had not come from the Chicago company, and in
retrospect he suffered again the horror of the days of waiting. It had
been all important. He could not blame his father for raving and shouting
about the house, he himself had felt like raving, and had put another
dollar of his savings into telegrams before the treasure was finally in
his hands. Now, the thought that it might not have come sickened him, and
a little prayer of thankfulness rose from his lips. To be sure one might
have been secured from a nearby town, but not a new shining one to go with
his father's new blue uniform.

A cheer broke from the crowd massed along the street. Into the street rode
a tall figure seated upon a white horse. The horse was from Culvert's
livery and the boys there had woven ribbons into its mane and tail. Windy
McPherson, sitting very straight in the saddle and looking wonderfully
striking in the new blue uniform and the broad-brimmed campaign hat, had
the air of a conqueror come to receive the homage of the town.
 He wore a gold band across his chest and against his hip rested the
shining bugle. With stern eyes he looked down upon the people.

The lump in the throat of the boy hurt more and more. A great wave of
pride ran over him, submerging him. In a moment he forgot all the past
humiliations the father had brought upon his family, and understood why
his mother remained silent when he, in his blindness, had wanted to
protest against her seeming indifference. Glancing furtively up he saw a
tear lying upon her cheek and felt that he too would like to sob aloud his
pride and happiness.

Slowly and with stately stride the horse walked up the street between the
rows of silent waiting people. In front of the town hall the tall military
figure, rising in the saddle, took one haughty look at the multitude, and
then, putting the bugle to his lips, blew.

Out of the bugle came only a thin piercing shriek followed by a squawk.
Again Windy put the bugle to his lips and again the same dismal squawk was
his only reward. On his face was a look of helpless boyish astonishment.

And in a moment the people knew. It was only another of Windy McPherson's
pretensions. He couldn't blow a bugle at all.

A great shout of laughter rolled down the street. Men and women sat on the
curbstones and laughed until they were tired. Then, looking at the figure
upon the motionless horse, they laughed again.

Windy looked about him with troubled eyes. It is doubtful if he had ever
had a bugle to his lips until that moment, but he was filled with wonder
and astonishment that the reveille did not roll forth. He had heard the
thing a thousand times and had it clearly in his mind; with all his heart
he wanted it to roll forth, and could picture the street ringing with it
and the applause of the people; the thing, he felt, was in him, and it was
only a fatal blunder in nature that it did not come out at the flaring end
of the bugle. He was amazed at this dismal end of his great moment--he was
always amazed and helpless before facts.

The crowd began gathering about the motionless, astonished figure,
laughter continuing to send them off into something near convulsions.
Grasping the bridle of the horse, John Telfer began leading it off up the
street. Boys whooped and shouted at the rider, "Blow! Blow!"

The three McPhersons stood in a doorway leading into a shoe store. The boy
and the mother, white and speechless with humiliation, dared not look at
each other. In the flood of shame sweeping over them they stared straight
before them with hard, stony eyes.

The procession led by John Telfer at the bridle of the white horse marched
down the street. Looking up, the eyes of the laughing, shouting man met
those of the boy and a look of pain shot across his face. Dropping the
bridle he hurried away through the crowd. The procession moved on, and
watching their chance the mother and the two children crept home along
side streets, Kate weeping bitterly. Leaving them at the door Sam went
straight on down a sandy road toward a small wood. "I've got my lesson.
I've got my lesson," he muttered over and over as he went.

At the edge of the wood he stopped and leaning on a rail fence watched
until he saw his mother come out to the pump in the back yard. She had
begun to draw water for the day's washing. For her also the holiday was at
an end. A flood of tears ran down the boy's cheeks, and he shook his fist
in the direction of the town. "You may laugh at that fool Windy, but you
shall never laugh at Sam McPherson," he cried, his voice shaking with
excitement.




CHAPTER III


One evening, when he had grown so that he outtopped Windy, Sam McPherson
returned from his paper route to find his mother arrayed in her black,
church-going dress. An evangelist was at work in Caxton and she had
decided to hear him. Sam shuddered. In the house it was an understood
thing that when Jane McPherson went to church her son went with her. There
was nothing said. Jane McPherson did all things without words, always
there was nothing said. Now she stood waiting in her black dress when her
son came in at the door and he hurriedly put on his best clothes and went
with her to the brick church.

Valmore, John Telfer, and Freedom Smith, who had taken upon themselves a
kind of common guardianship of the boy and with whom he spent evening
after evening at the back of Wildman's grocery, did not go to church. They
talked of religion and seemed singularly curious and interested in what
other men thought on the subject but they did not allow themselves to be
coaxed into a house of worship. To the boy, who had become a fourth member
of the evening gatherings at the back of the grocery store, they would not
talk of God, answering the direct questions he sometimes asked by changing
the subject. Once Telfer, the reader of poetry, answered the boy. "Sell
papers and fill your pockets with money but let your soul sleep," he said
sharply.

In the absence of the others Wildman talked more freely. He was a
spiritualist and tried to make Sam see the beauties of that faith. On long
summer afternoons the grocer and the boy spent hours driving through the
streets in a rattling old delivery wagon, the man striving earnestly to
make clear to the boy the shadowy ideas of God that were in his mind.

Although Windy McPherson had been the leader of a Bible class in his
youth, and had been a moving spirit at revival meetings during his early
days in Caxton, he no longer went to church and his wife did not ask him
to go. On Sunday mornings he lay abed. If there was work to be done about
the house or yard he complained of his wounds. He complained of his wounds
when the rent fell due, and when there was a shortage of food in the
house. Later in his life and after the death of Jane McPherson the old
soldier married the widow of a farmer by whom he had four children and
with whom he went to church twice on Sunday. Kate wrote Sam one of her
infrequent letters about it. "He has met his match," she said, and was
tremendously pleased.

In church on Sunday mornings Sam went regularly to sleep, putting his head
on his mother's arm and sleeping throughout the service. Jane McPherson
loved to have the boy there beside her. It was the one thing in life they
did together and she did not mind his sleeping the time away. Knowing how
late he had been upon the streets at the paper selling on Saturday
evenings, she looked at him with eyes filled with tenderness and sympathy.
Once the minister, a man with brown beard and hard, tightly-closed mouth,
spoke to her. "Can't you keep him awake?" he asked impatiently. "He needs
the sleep," she said and hurried past the minister and out of the church,
looking ahead of her and frowning.

The evening of the evangelist meeting was a summer evening fallen on a
winter month. All day the warm winds had come up from the southwest. Mud
lay soft and deep in the streets and among the little pools of water on
the sidewalks were dry spots from which steam arose. Nature had forgotten
herself. A day that should have sent old fellows to their nests behind
stoves in stores sent them forth to loaf in the sun. The night fell warm
and cloudy. A thunder storm threatened in the month of February.

Sam walked along the sidewalk with his mother bound for the brick church,
wearing a new grey overcoat. The night did not demand the overcoat but Sam
wore it out of an excess of pride in its possession. The overcoat had an
air. It had been made by Gunther the tailor after a design sketched on the
back of a piece of wrapping paper by John Telfer and had been paid for out
of the newsboy's savings. The little German tailor, after a talk with
Valmore and Telfer, had made it at a marvellously low price. Sam swaggered
as he walked.

He did not sleep in church that evening; indeed he found the quiet church
filled with a medley of strange noises. Folding carefully the new coat and
laying it beside him on the seat he looked with interest at the people,
feeling within him something of the nervous excitement with which the air
was charged. The evangelist, a short, athletic-looking man in a grey
business suit, seemed to the boy out of place in the church. He had the
assured business-like air of the travelling men who come to the New Leland
House, and Sam thought he looked like a man who had goods to be sold. He
did not stand quietly back of the pulpit giving out the text as did the
brown-bearded minister, nor did he sit with closed eyes and clasped hands
waiting for the choir to finish singing. While the choir sang he ran up
and down the platform waving his arms and shouting excitedly to the people
on the church benches, "Sing! Sing! Sing! For the glory of God, sing!"

When the song was finished, he began talking, quietly at first, of life in
the town. As he talked he grew more and more excited. "The town is a
cesspool of vice!" he shouted. "It reeks with evil! The devil counts it a
suburb of hell!"

His voice rose, and sweat ran off his face. A sort of frenzy seized him.
He pulled off his coat and throwing it over a chair ran up and down the
platform and into the aisles among the people, shouting, threatening,
pleading. People began to stir uneasily in their seats. Jane McPherson
stared stonily at the back of the woman in front of her. Sam was horribly
frightened.

The newsboy of Caxton was not without a hunger for religion. Like all boys
he thought much and often of death. In the night he sometimes awakened
cold with fear, thinking that death must be just without the door of his
room waiting for him. When in the winter he had a cold and coughed, he
trembled at the thought of tuberculosis. Once, when he was taken with a
fever, he fell asleep and dreamed that he had died and was walking on the
trunk of a fallen tree over a ravine filled with lost souls that shrieked
with terror. When he awoke he prayed. Had some one come into his room and
heard his prayer he would have been ashamed.

On winter evenings as he walked through the dark streets with the papers
under his arm he thought of his soul. As he thought a tenderness came over
him; a lump came into his throat and he pitied himself; he felt that there
was something missing in his life, something he wanted very badly.

Under John Telfer's influence, the boy, who had quit school to devote
himself to money making, read Walt Whitman and had a season of admiring
his own body with its straight white legs, and the head that was poised so
jauntily on the body. Sometimes he would awaken on summer nights and be so
filled with strange longing that he would creep out of bed and, pushing
open the window, sit upon the floor, his bare legs sticking out beyond his
white nightgown, and, thus sitting, yearn eagerly toward some fine
impulse, some call, some sense of bigness and of leadership that was
absent from the necessities of the life he led. He looked at the stars and
listened to the night noises, so filled with longing that the tears sprang
to his eyes.

Once, after the affair of the bugle, Jane McPherson had been ill--and the
first touch of the finger of death reaching out to her--had sat with her
son in the warm darkness in the little grass plot at the front of the
house. It was a clear, warm, starlit evening without a moon, and as the
two sat closely together a sense of the coming of death crept over the
mother.

At the evening meal Windy McPherson had talked voluminously, ranting and
shouting about the house. He said that a housepainter who had a real sense
of colour had no business trying to work in a hole like Caxton. He had
been in trouble with a housewife about a colour he had mixed for painting
a porch floor and at his own table he raved about the woman and what he
declared her lack of even a primitive sense of colour. "I am sick of it
all," he shouted, going out of the house and up the street with uncertain
steps. His wife had been unmoved by his outburst, but in the presence of
the quiet boy whose chair touched her own she trembled with a strange new
fear and began to talk of the life after death, making effort after effort
to get at what she wanted to say, and only succeeding in finding
expression for her thoughts in little sentences broken by long painful
pauses. She told the boy she had no doubt at all that there was some kind
of future life and that she believed she should see and live with him
again after they had finished with this world.

One day the minister who had been annoyed because he had slept in his
church, stopped Sam on the street to talk to him of his soul. He said that
the boy should be thinking of making himself one of the brothers in Christ
by joining the church. Sam listened silently to the talk of the man, whom
he instinctively disliked, but in his silence felt there was something
insincere. With all his heart he wanted to repeat a sentence he had heard
from the lips of grey-haired, big-fisted Valmore--"How can they believe
and not lead a life of simple, fervent devotion to their belief?" He
thought himself superior to the thin-lipped man who talked with him and
had he been able to express what was in his heart he might have said,
"Look here, man! I am made of different stuff from all the people there at
the church. I am new clay to be moulded into a new man. Not even my mother
is like me. I do not accept your ideas of life just because you say they
are good any more than I accept Windy McPherson just because he happens to
be my father."

During one winter Sam spent evening after evening reading the Bible in his
room. It was after Kate's marriage--she had got into an affair with a
young farmer that had kept her name upon the tongues of whisperers for
months but was now a housewife on a farm at the edge of a village some
miles from Caxton, and the mother was again at her endless task among the
soiled clothes in the kitchen and Windy McPherson off drinking and
boasting about town. Sam read the book in secret. He had a lamp on a
little stand beside his bed and a novel, lent him by John Telfer, beside
it. When his mother came up the stairway he slipped the Bible under the
cover of the bed and became absorbed in the novel. He thought it something
not quite in keeping with his aims as a business man and a money getter to
be concerned about his soul. He wanted to conceal his concern but with all
his heart wanted to get hold of the message of the strange book, about
which men wrangled hour after hour on winter evenings in the store.

He did not get it; and after a time he stopped reading the book. Left to
himself he might have sensed its meaning, but on all sides of him were the
voices of the men--the men at Wildman's who owned to no faith and yet were
filled with dogmatisms as they talked behind the stove in the grocery; the
brown-bearded, thin-lipped minister in the brick church; the shouting,
pleading evangelists who came to visit the town in the winter; the gentle
old grocer who talked vaguely of the spirit world,--all these voices were
at the mind of the boy pleading, insisting, demanding, not that Christ's
simple message that men love one another to the end, that they work
together for the common good, be accepted, but that their own complex
interpretation of his word be taken to the end that souls be saved.

In the end the boy of Caxton got to the place where he had a dread of the
word soul. It seemed to him that the mention of the word in conversation
was something shameful and to think of the word or the shadowy something
for which the word stood an act of cowardice. In his mind the soul became
a thing to be hidden away, covered up, not thought of. One might be
allowed to speak of the matter at the moment of death, but for the healthy
man or boy to have the thought of his soul in his mind or word of it on
his lips--one might better become blatantly profane and go to the devil
with a swagger. With delight he imagined himself as dying and with his
last breath tossing a round oath into the air of his death chamber.

In the meantime Sam continued to have inexplicable longings and hopes. He
kept surprising himself by the changing aspect of his own viewpoint of
life. He found himself indulging in the most petty meannesses, and
following these with flashes of a kind of loftiness of mind. Looking at a
girl passing in the street, he had unbelievably mean thoughts; and the
next day, passing the same girl, a line caught from the babbling of John
Telfer came to his lips and he went his way muttering, "June's twice June
since she breathed it with me."

And then into the complex nature of this boy came the sex motive. Already
he dreamed of having women in his arms. He looked shyly at the ankles of
women crossing the street, and listened eagerly when the crowd about the
stove in Wildman's fell to telling smutty stories. He sank to unbelievable
depths of triviality in sordidness, looking shyly into dictionaries for
words that appealed to the animal lust in his queerly perverted mind and,
when he came across it, lost entirely the beauty of the old Bible tale of
Ruth in the suggestion of intimacy between man and woman that it brought
to him. And yet Sam McPherson was no evil-minded boy. He had, as a matter
of fact, a quality of intellectual honesty that appealed strongly to the
clean-minded, simple-hearted old blacksmith Valmore; he had awakened
something like love in the hearts of the women school teachers in the
Caxton schools, at least one of whom continued to interest herself in him,
taking him with her on walks along country roads, and talking to him
constantly of the development of his mind; and he was the friend and boon
companion of Telfer, the dandy, the reader of poems, the keen lover of
life. The boy was struggling to find himself. One night when the sex call
kept him awake he got up and dressed, and went and stood in the rain by
the creek in Miller's pasture. The wind swept the rain across the face of
the water and a sentence flashed through his mind: "The little feet of the
rain run on the water." There was a quality of almost lyrical beauty in
the Iowa boy.

And this boy, who couldn't get hold of his impulse toward God, whose sex
impulses made him at times mean, at times full of beauty, and who had
decided that the impulse toward bargaining and money getting was the
impulse in him most worth cherishing, now sat beside his mother in church
and watched with wide-open eyes the man who took off his coat, who sweated
profusely, and who called the town in which he lived a cesspool of vice
and its citizens wards of the devil.

The evangelist from talking of the town began talking instead of heaven
and hell and his earnestness caught the attention of the listening boy who
began seeing pictures.

Into his mind there came a picture of a burning pit of fire in which great
flames leaped about the heads of the people who writhed in the pit. "Art
Sherman would be there," thought Sam, materialising the picture he saw;
"nothing can save him; he keeps a saloon."

Filled with pity for the man he saw in the picture of the burning pit, his
mind centered on the person of Art Sherman. He liked Art Sherman. More
than once he had felt the touch of human kindness in the man. The roaring,
blustering saloonkeeper had helped the boy sell and collect for
newspapers. "Pay the kid or get out of the place," the red-faced man
roared at drunken men leaning on the bar.

And then, looking into the burning pit, Sam thought of Mike McCarthy, for
whom he had at that moment a kind of passion akin to a young girl's blind
devotion to her lover. With a shudder he realised that Mike also would go
into the pit, for he had heard Mike laughing at churches and declaring
there was no God.

The evangelist ran upon the platform and called to the people demanding
that they stand upon their feet. "Stand up for Jesus," he shouted; "stand
up and be counted among the host of the Lord God."

In the church people began getting to their feet. Jane McPherson stood
with the others. Sam did not stand. He crept behind his mother's dress,
hoping to pass through the storm unnoticed. The call to the faithful to
stand was a thing to be complied with or resisted as the people might
wish; it was something entirely outside of himself. It did not occur to
him to count himself among either the lost or the saved.

Again the choir began singing and a businesslike movement began among the
people. Men and women went up and down the aisles clasping the hands of
people in the pews, talking and praying aloud. "Welcome among us," they
said to certain ones who stood upon their feet. "It gladdens our hearts to
see you among us. We are happy at seeing you in the fold among the saved.
It is good to confess Jesus."

Suddenly a voice from the bench back of him struck terror to Sam's heart.
Jim Williams, who worked in Sawyer's barber shop, was upon his knees and
in a loud voice was praying for the soul of Sam McPherson. "Lord, help
this erring boy who goes up and down in the company of sinners and
publicans," he shouted.

In a moment the terror of death and the fiery pit that had possessed him
passed, and Sam was filled instead with blind, dumb rage. He remembered
that this same Jim Williams had treated lightly the honour of his sister
at the time of her disappearance, and he wanted to get upon his feet and
pour out his wrath on the head of the man, who, he felt, had betrayed him.
"They would not have seen me," he thought; "this is a fine trick Jim
Williams has played me. I shall be even with him for this."

He got to his feet and stood beside his mother. He had no qualms about
passing himself off as one of the lambs safely within the fold. His mind
was bent upon quieting Jim Williams' prayers and avoiding the attention of
the people.

The minister began calling on the standing people to testify of their
salvation. From various parts of the church the people spoke out, some
loudly and boldly and with a ring of confidence in their voices, some
tremblingly and hesitatingly. One woman wept loudly shouting between the
paroxysms of sobbing that seized her, "The weight of my sins is heavy on
my soul." Girls and young men when called on by the minister responded
with shamed, hesitating voices asking that a verse of some hymn be sung,
or quoting a line of scripture.

At the back of the church the evangelist with one of the deacons and two
or three women had gathered about a small, black-haired woman, the wife of
a baker to whom Sam delivered papers. They were urging her to rise and get
within the fold, and Sam turned and watched her curiously, his sympathy
going out to her. With all his heart he hoped that she would continue
doggedly shaking her head.

Suddenly the irrepressible Jim Williams broke forth again. A quiver ran
over Sam's body and the blood rose to his cheeks. "Here is another sinner
saved," shouted Jim, pointing to the standing boy. "Count this boy, Sam
McPherson, in the fold among the lambs."

On the platform the brown-bearded minister stood upon a chair and looked
over the heads of the people. An ingratiating smile played about his lips.
"Let us hear from the young man, Sam McPherson," he said, raising his hand
for silence, and, then, encouragingly, "Sam, what have you to say for the
Lord?"

Become the centre for the attention of the people in the church Sam was
terror-stricken. The rage against Jim Williams was forgotten in the spasm
of fear that seized him. He looked over his shoulder to the door at the
back of the church and thought longingly of the quiet street outside. He
hesitated, stammered, grew more red and uncertain, and finally burst out:
"The Lord," he said, and then looked about hopelessly, "the Lord maketh me
to lie out in green pastures."

In the seats behind him a titter arose. A young woman sitting among the
singers in the choir put her handkerchief to her face and throwing back
her head rocked back and forth. A man near the door guffawed loudly and
went hurriedly out. All over the church people began laughing.

Sam turned his eyes upon his mother. She was staring straight ahead of
her, and her face was red. "I'm going out of this place and I'm never
coming back again," he whispered, and, stepping into the aisle, walked
boldly toward the door. He had made up his mind that if the evangelist
tried to stop him he would fight. At his back he felt the rows of people
looking at him and smiling. The laughter continued.

In the street he hurried along consumed with indignation. "I'll never go
into any church again," he swore, shaking his fist in the air. The public
avowals he had heard in the church seemed to him cheap and unworthy. He
wondered why his mother stayed in there. With a sweep of his arm he
dismissed all the people in the church. "It is a place to make public
asses of the people," he thought.

Sam McPherson wandered through Main Street, dreading to meet Valmore and
John Telfer. Finding the chairs back of the stove in Wildman's grocery
deserted, he hurried past the grocer and hid in a corner. Tears of wrath
stood in his eyes. He had been made a fool of. He imagined the scene that
would go on when he came upon the street with the papers the next morning.
Freedom Smith would be there sitting in the old worn buggy and roaring so
that all the street would listen and laugh. "Going to lie out in any green
pastures to-night, Sam?" he would shout. "Ain't you afraid you'll take
cold?" By Geiger's drug store would stand Valmore and Telfer, eager to
join in the fun at his expense. Telfer would pound on the side of the
building with his cane and roar with laughter. Valmore would make a
trumpet of his hands and shout after the fleeing boy. "Do you sleep out
alone in them green pastures?" Freedom Smith would roar again.

Sam got up and went out of the grocery. As he hurried along, blind with
wrath, he felt he would like a stand-up fight with some one. And, then,
hurrying and avoiding the people, he merged with the crowd on the street
and became a witness to the strange thing that happened that night in
Caxton.

       *       *       *       *       *

In Main Street hushed people stood about in groups talking. The air was
heavy with excitement. Solitary figures went from group to group
whispering hoarsely. Mike McCarthy, the man who had denied God and who had
won a place for himself in the affection of the newsboy, had assaulted a
man with a pocket knife and had left him bleeding and wounded beside a
country road. Something big and sensational had happened in the life of
the town.

Mike McCarthy and Sam were friends. For years the man had idled upon the
streets of the town, loitering about, boasting and talking. He had sat for
hours in a chair under a tree before the New Leland House, reading books,
doing tricks with cards, engaging in long discussions with John Telfer or
any who would stand up to him.

Mike McCarthy got into trouble in a fight over a woman. A young farmer
living at the edge of Caxton had come home from the fields to find his
wife in the bold Irishman's arms and the two men had gone out of the house
together to fight in the road. The woman, weeping in the house, followed
to ask forgiveness of her husband. Running in the gathering darkness along
the road she had found him cut and bleeding terribly, lying in a ditch
under a hedge. On down the road she ran and appeared at the door of a
neighbour, screaming and calling for help.

The story of the fight in the road got to Caxton just as Sam came out of
the corner, back of the stove in Wildman's and appeared on the street. Men
ran from store to store and from group to group along the street saying
that the young farmer had died and that murder had been done. On a street
corner Windy McPherson harangued the crowd declaring that the men of
Caxton should arise in the defence of their homes and string the murderer
to a lamp post. Hop Higgins, driving a horse from Culvert's livery,
appeared on Main Street. "He will be at the McCarthy farm," he shouted.
When several men, coming out of Geiger's drug store, stopped the marshal's
horse, saying, "You will have trouble out there; you had better take
help," the little red-faced marshal with the crippled leg laughed. "What
trouble?" he asked--"To get Mike McCarthy? I shall ask him to come and he
will come. The rest of that lot won't cut any figure. Mike can wrap the
entire McCarthy family around his finger."

There were six of the McCarthy men, all, except Mike, silent, sullen men
who only talked when they were in liquor. Mike furnished the town's social
touch with the family. It was a strange family to live there in that fat,
corn-growing country, a family with something savage and primitive about
it, one that belonged among western mining camps or among the half savage
dwellers in deep alleys in cities, and the fact that it lived on a corn
farm in Iowa was, in the words of John Telfer, "something monstrous in
Nature."

The McCarthy farm, lying some four miles east of Caxton, had once
contained a thousand acres of good corn-growing land. Lem McCarthy, the
father of the family, had inherited it from a brother, a gold miner, a
forty-niner, a sport owning fast horses, who planned to breed race horses
on the Iowa land. Lem had come out of the back streets of an eastern city,
bringing his brood of tall, silent, savage boys to live upon the land and,
like the forty-niner, to be a sport. Thinking the wealth that had come to
him vast beyond spending, he had plunged into horse racing and gambling.
When, within two years, five hundred acres of the farm had to be sold to
pay gambling debts, and the wide acres lay covered with weeds, Lem became
alarmed, and settled down to hard work, the boys working all day in the
field and at long intervals coming into town at night to get into trouble.
Having no mother or sister, and knowing that no Caxton woman could be
hired to go upon the place, they did their own housework; and on rainy
days sat about the old farmhouse playing cards and fighting. On other days
they would stand around the bar in Art Sherman's saloon in Piety Hollow
drinking until they had lost their savage silence and had become loud and
quarrelsome, going from there upon the streets to seek trouble. Once,
going into Hayner's restaurant, they took stacks of plates from shelves
back of the counter and, standing in the doorway, threw them at people
passing in the street, the crash of the breaking crockery accompanying
their roaring laughter. When they had driven the people to cover they got
upon their horses and with wild shouts raced up and down Main Street
between the rows of tied horses until Hop Higgins, the town marshal,
appeared, when they rode off into the country awakening the farmers along
the darkened road as they fled, shouting and singing, toward home.

When the McCarthy boys got into trouble in Caxton, old Lem McCarthy drove
into town and got them out of it, paying for the damage done and going
about declaring the boys meant no harm. When told to keep them out of town
he shook his head and said he would try.

Mike McCarthy did not ride swearing and singing with the five brothers
along the dark road. He did not work all day in the hot corn fields. He
was the family gentleman, and, wearing good clothes, strolled instead upon
the street or loitered in the shade before the New Leland House. Mike had
been educated. For some years he had attended a college in Indiana from
which he was expelled for an affair with a woman. After his return from
college he stayed in Caxton, living at the hotel and making a pretence of
studying law in the office of old Judge Reynolds. He paid slight attention
to the study of law, but with infinite patience had so trained his hands
that he became wonderfully dexterous with coins and cards, plucking them
out of the air and making them appear in the shoes, the hats, and even in
the mouths, of bystanders. During the day he walked the streets looking at
the girl clerks in the stores, or stood upon the station platform waving
his hand to women passengers on passing trains. He told John Telfer that
the flattery of women was a lost art that he intended to restore. Mike
McCarthy carried in his pockets books which he read sitting in a chair
before the hotel or on the stones before store windows. When on Saturdays
the streets were filled with people, he stood on the corners giving
gratuitous performances of his magical art with cards and coins, and
eyeing country girls in the crowd. Once, a woman, the town stationer's
wife, shouted at him, calling him a lazy lout, whereupon he threw a coin
in the air, and when it did not come down rushed toward her shouting, "She
has it in her stocking." When the stationer's wife ran into her shop and
banged the door the crowd laughed and shouted with delight.

Telfer had a liking for the tall, grey-eyed, loitering McCarthy and
sometimes sat with him discussing a novel or a poem; Sam in the background
listened eagerly. Valmore did not care for the man, shaking his head and
declaring that such a fellow could come to no good end.

The rest of the town agreed with Valmore, and McCarthy, knowing this,
sunned himself in the town's displeasure. For the sake of the public furor
it brought down upon his head he proclaimed himself a socialist, an
anarchist, an atheist, a pagan. Among all the McCarthy boys he alone cared
greatly about women, and he made public and open declarations of his
passion for them. Before the men gathered about the stove in Wildman's
grocery store he would stand whipping them into a frenzy by declaring for
free love, and vowing that he would have the best of any woman who gave
him the chance.

For this man the frugal, hard working newsboy had conceived a regard
amounting to a passion. As he listened to McCarthy he got continuous
delightful little thrills. "There is nothing he would not dare," thought
the boy. "He is the freest, the boldest, the bravest man in town." When
the young Irishman, seeing the admiration in his eyes, flung him a silver
dollar saying, "That is for your fine brown eyes, my boy; it I had them I
would have half the women in town after me," Sam kept the dollar in his
pocket and counted it a kind of treasure like the rose given a lover by
his sweetheart.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was past eleven o'clock when Hop Higgins returned to town with
McCarthy, driving quietly along the street and through an alley at the
back of the town hall. The crowd upon the street had broken up. Sam had
gone from one to another of the muttering groups, his heart quaking with
fear. Now he stood at the back of the mass of men gathered at the jail
door. An oil lamp, burning at the top of the post above the door, threw
dancing, flickering lights on the faces of the men before him. The thunder
storm that had threatened had not come, but the unnatural warm wind
continued and the sky overhead was inky black.

Through the alley, to the jail door, drove the town marshal, the young
McCarthy sitting in the buggy beside him. A man rushed forward to hold the
horse. McCarthy's face was chalky white. He laughed and shouted, raising
his hand toward the sky.

"I am Michael, son of God. I have cut a man with a knife so that his red
blood ran upon the ground. I am the son of God and this filthy jail shall
be my sanctuary. In there I shall talk aloud with my Father," he roared
hoarsely, shaking his fist at the crowd. "Sons of this cesspool of
respectability, stay and hear! Send for your females and let them stand in
the presence of a man!"

Taking the white, wild-eyed man by the arm Marshal Higgins led him into
the jail, the clank of locks, the low murmur of the voice of Higgins and
the wild laughter of McCarthy floating out to the group of silent men
standing in the mud of the alley.

Sam McPherson ran past the group of men to the side of the jail and
finding John Telfer and Valmore leaning silently against the wall of Tom
Folger's wagon shop slipped between them. Telfer put out his arm and laid
it upon the boy's shoulder. Hop Higgins, coming out of the jail, addressed
the crowd. "Don't answer if he talks," he said; "he is as crazy as a
loon."

Sam moved closer to Telfer. The voice of the imprisoned man, loud, and
filled with a startling boldness, rolled out of the jail. He began
praying.

"Hear me, Father Almighty, who has permitted this town of Caxton to exist
and has let me, Thy son, grow to manhood. I am Michael, Thy son. They have
put me in this jail where rats run across the floor and they stand in the
mud outside as I talk with Thee. Are you there, old Truepenny?"

A breath of cold air blew up the alley followed by a flaw of rain. The
group under the flickering lamp by the jail entrance drew back against the
walls of the building. Sam could see them dimly, pressing closely against
the wall. The man in the jail laughed loudly.

"I have had a philosophy of life, O Father," he shouted. "I have seen men
and women here living year after year without children. I have seen them
hoarding pennies and denying Thee new life on which to work Thy will. To
these women I have gone secretly talking of carnal love. With them I have
been gentle and kind; them I have flattered."

A roaring laugh broke from the lips of the imprisoned man. "Are you there,
oh dwellers in the cesspool of respectability?" he shouted. "Do you stand
in the mud with cold feet listening? I have been with your wives. Eleven
Caxton wives without babes have I been with and it has been fruitless. The
twelfth woman I have just left, leaving her man in the road a bleeding
sacrifice to thee. I shall call out the names of the eleven. I shall have
revenge also upon the husbands of the women, some of whom wait with the
others in the mud outside."

He began calling off the names of Caxton wives. A shudder ran through the
body of the boy, sensitised by the new chill in the air and by the
excitement of the night. Among the men standing along the wall of the jail
a murmur arose. Again they grouped themselves under the flickering light
by the jail door, disregarding the rain. Valmore, stumbling out of the
darkness beside Sam, stood before Telfer. "The boy should be going home,"
he said; "this isn't fit for him to hear."

Telfer laughed and drew Sam closer to him. "He has heard enough lies in
this town," he said. "Truth won't hurt him. I would not go myself, nor
would you, and the boy shall not go. This McCarthy has a brain. Although
he is half insane now he is trying to work something out. The boy and I
will stay to hear."

The voice from the jail continued calling out the names of Caxton wives.
Voices in the group before the jail door began shouting: "This should be
stopped. Let us tear down the jail."

McCarthy laughed aloud. "They squirm, oh Father, they squirm; I have them
in the pit and I torture them," he cried.

An ugly feeling of satisfaction came over Sam. He had a sense of the fact
that the names shouted from the jail would be repeated over and over
through the town. One of the women whose names had been called out had
stood with the evangelist at the back of the church trying to induce the
wife of the baker to rise and be counted in the fold with the lambs.

The rain, falling on the shoulders of the men by the jail door, changed to
hail, the air grew colder and the hailstones rattled on the roofs of
buildings. Some of the men joined Telfer and Valmore, talking in low,
excited voices. "And Mary McKane, too, the hypocrite," Sam heard one of
them say.

The voice inside the jail changed. Still praying, Mike McCarthy seemed
also to be talking to the group in the darkness outside.

"I am sick of my life. I have sought leadership and have not found it. Oh
Father! Send down to men a new Christ, one to get hold of us, a modern
Christ with a pipe in his mouth who will swear and knock us about so that
we vermin who pretend to be made in Thy image will understand. Let him go
into churches and into courthouses, into cities, and into towns like this,
shouting, 'Be ashamed! Be ashamed of your cowardly concern over your
snivelling souls!' Let him tell us that never will our lives, so miserably
lived, be repeated after our bodies lie rotting in the grave."

A sob broke from his lips and a lump came into Sam's throat.

"Oh Father! help us men of Caxton to understand that we have only this,
our lives, this life so warm and hopeful and laughing in the sun, this
life with its awkward boys full of strange possibilities, and its girls
with their long legs and freckles on their noses, that are meant to carry
life within themselves, new life, kicking and stirring, and waking them at
night."

The voice of the prayer broke. Wild sobs took the place of speech.
"Father!" shouted the broken voice, "I have taken a life, a man that moved
and talked and whistled in the sunshine on winter mornings; I have
killed."

       *       *       *       *       *

The voice inside the jail became inaudible. Silence, broken by low sobs
from the jail, fell on the little dark alley and the listening men began
going silently away. The lump in Sam's throat grew larger. Tears stood in
his eyes. He went with Telfer and Valmore out of the alley and into the
street, the two men walking in silence. The rain had ceased and a cold
wind blew.

The boy felt that he had been shriven. His mind, his heart, even his tired
body seemed strangely cleansed. He felt a new affection for Telfer and
Valmore. When Telfer began talking he listened eagerly, thinking that at
last he understood him and knew why men like Valmore, Wildman, Freedom
Smith, and Telfer loved each other and went on being friends year after
year in the face of difficulties and misunderstandings. He thought that he
had got hold of the idea of brotherhood that John Telfer talked of so
often and so eloquently. "Mike McCarthy is only a brother who has gone the
dark road," he thought and felt a glow of pride in the thought and in the
apt expression of it in his mind.

John Telfer, forgetting the boy, talked soberly to Valmore, the two men
stumbling along in the darkness intent upon their own thoughts.

"It is an odd thought," said Telfer and his voice seemed far away and
unnatural like the voice from the jail; "it is an odd thought that but for
a quirk in the brain this Mike McCarthy might himself have been a kind of
Christ with a pipe in his mouth."

Valmore stumbled and half fell in the darkness at a street crossing.
Telfer went on talking.

"The world will some day grope its way into some kind of an understanding
of its extraordinary men. Now they suffer terribly. In success or in such
failures as has come to this imaginative, strangely perverted Irishman
their lot is pitiful. It is only the common, the plain, unthinking man who
slides peacefully through this troubled world."

At the house Jane McPherson sat waiting for her boy. She was thinking of
the scene in the church and a hard light was in her eyes. Sam went past
the sleeping room of his parents, where Windy McPherson snored peacefully,
and up the stairway to his own room. He undressed and, putting out the
light, knelt upon the floor. From the wild ravings of the man in the jail
he had got hold of something. In the midst of the blasphemy of Mike
McCarthy he had sensed a deep and abiding love of life. Where the church
had failed the bold sensualist succeeded. Sam felt that he could have
prayed in the presence of the entire town.

"Oh, Father!" he cried, sending up his voice in the silence of the little
room, "make me stick to the thought that the right living of this, my
life, is my duty to you."

By the door below, while Valmore waited on the sidewalk, Telfer talked to
Jane McPherson.

"I wanted Sam to hear," he explained. "He needs a religion. All young men
need a religion. I wanted him to hear how even a man like Mike McCarthy
keeps instinctively trying to justify himself before God."




CHAPTER IV


John Telfer's friendship was a formative influence upon Sam McPherson. His
father's worthlessness and the growing realisation of the hardship of his
mother's position had given life a bitter taste in his mouth, and Telfer
sweetened it. He entered with zeal into Sam's thoughts and dreams, and
tried valiantly to arouse in the quiet, industrious, money-making boy some
of his own love of life and beauty. At night, as the two walked down
country roads, the man would stop and, waving his arms about, quote Poe or
Browning or, in another mood, would compel Sam's attention to the rare
smell of a hayfield or to a moonlit stretch of meadow.

Before people gathered on the streets he teased the boy, calling him a
little money grubber and saying, "He is like a little mole that works
underground. As the mole goes for a worm so this boy goes for a five-cent
piece. I have watched him. A travelling man goes out of town leaving a
stray dime or nickel here and within an hour it is in this boy's pocket. I
have talked to banker Walker of him. He trembles lest his vaults become
too small to hold the wealth of this young Croesus. The day will come when
he will buy the town and put it into his vest pocket."

For all his public teasing of the boy Telfer had the genius to adopt a
different attitude when they were alone together. Then he talked to him
openly and freely as he talked to Valmore and Freedom Smith and to other
cronies of his on the streets of Caxton. Walking along the road he would
point with his cane to the town and say, "You and that mother of yours
have more of the real stuff in you than the rest of the boys and mothers
of the town put together."

In all Caxton Telfer was the only man who knew books and who took them
seriously. Sam sometimes found his attitude toward them puzzling and would
stand with open mouth listening as Telfer swore or laughed at a book as he
did at Valmore or Freedom Smith. He had a fine portrait of Browning which
he kept hung in the stable and before this he would stand, his legs spread
apart, and his head tilted to one side, talking.

"A rich old sport you are, eh?" he would say, grinning. "Getting yourself
discussed by women and college professors in clubs, eh? You old fraud!"

Toward Mary Underwood, the school teacher who had become Sam's friend and
with whom the boy sometimes walked and talked, Telfer had no charity. Mary
Underwood was a sort of cinder in the eyes of Caxton. She was the only
child of Silas Underwood, the town harness maker, who once had worked in a
shop belonging to Windy McPherson. After the business failure of Windy he
had started independently and for a time did well, sending his daughter to
a school in Massachusetts. Mary did not understand the people of Caxton
and the people misunderstood and distrusted her. Taking no part in the
life of the town and keeping to herself and to her books she awoke a kind
of fear in others. Because she did not join them at church suppers, or go
from porch to porch gossiping with other women through the long summer
evenings, they thought her something abnormal. On Sundays she sat alone in
her pew at church and on Saturday afternoons, come storm, come sunshine,
she walked on country roads and through the woods accompanied by a collie
dog. She was a small woman with a straight, slender figure and had fine
blue eyes filled with changing lights, hidden by the eye-glasses she
almost constantly wore. Her lips were very full and red, and she sat with
them parted so that the edges of her fine teeth showed. Her nose was
large, and a fine reddish-brown colour glowed in her cheeks. Though
different, she had, like Jane McPherson, a habit of silence; and under her
silence, she, like Sam's mother, possessed an unusually strong and
vigorous mind.

As a child she was a sort of half invalid and had not been on friendly
footing with other children. It was then that her habit of silence and
reticence had been established. The years in the school in Massachusetts
restored her health but did not break this habit. She came home and took
the place in the schools to earn money with which to take her back East,
dreaming of a position as instructor in an eastern college. She was that
rare thing, a woman scholar, loving scholarship for its own sake.

Mary Underwood's position in the town and in the schools was insecure. Out
of her silent, independent way of life had sprung a misunderstanding that,
at least once, had taken definite form and had come near driving her from
the town and schools. That she did not succumb to the storm of criticism
that for some weeks beat about her head was due to her habit of silence
and to a determination to get her own way in the face of everything.

It was a suggestion of scandal that had put the grey hairs upon her head.
The scandal had blown over before the time of her friendship for Sam, but
he had known of it. In those days he knew of everything that went on in
the town--his quick ears and eyes missed nothing. More than once he had
heard the men waiting to be shaved in Sawyer's barber shop speak of her.

The tale ran that she had been involved in an affair with a real estate
agent who had afterward left town. It was said that the man, a tall, fine-
looking fellow, had been in love with Mary and had wanted to desert his
wife and go away with her. One night he had driven to Mary's house in a
closed buggy and the two had driven into the country. They had sat for
hours in the covered buggy at the side of the road and talked, and people
driving past had seen them there talking together.

And then she had got out of the buggy and walked home alone through snow
drifts. The next day she was at school as usual. When told of it the
school superintendent, a puttering old fellow with vacant eyes, had shaken
his head in alarm and declared that it must be looked into. He called Mary
into his little narrow office in the school building, but lost courage
when she sat before him, and said nothing. The man in the barber shop, who
repeated the tale, said that the real estate man drove on to a distant
station and took a train to the city, and that some days later he came
back to Caxton and moved his family out of town.

Sam dismissed the story from his mind. Having begun a friendship for Mary
he put the man in the barber shop into a class with Windy McPherson and
thought of him as a pretender and liar who talked for the sake of talk. He
remembered with a shock the crude levity with which the loafers in the
shop had greeted the repetition of the tale. Their comments had come back
to his mind as he walked through the streets with his newspapers and had
given him a kind of jolt. He went along under the trees thinking of the
sunlight falling upon the grey hair as they walked together on summer
afternoons, and bit his lip and opened and closed his fist convulsively.

During Mary's second year in the Caxton schools her mother died, and at
the end of another year, her father, failing in the harness business, Mary
became a fixture in the schools. The house at the edge of the town, the
property of her mother, had come down to her and she lived there with an
old aunt. After the passing of the wind of scandal concerning the real
estate man the town lost interest in her. She was thirty-six at the time
of her first friendship with Sam and lived alone among her books.

Sam had been deeply moved by her friendship. It had seemed to him
something significant that grown people with affairs of their own should
be so in earnest about his future as she and Telfer were. Boylike, he
counted it a tribute to himself rather than to the winsome youth in him,
and was made proud by it. Having no real feeling for books, and only
pretending to have out of a desire to please, he sometimes went from one
to the other of his two friends, passing off their opinions as his own.

At this trick Telfer invariably caught him. "That is not your notion," he
would shout, "you have it from that school teacher. It is the opinion of a
woman. Their opinions, like the books they sometimes write, are founded on
nothing. They are not the real things. Women know nothing. Men only care
for them because they have not had what they want from them. No woman is
really big--except maybe my woman, Eleanor."

When Sam continued to be much in the company of Mary, Telfer grew more
bitter.

"I would have you observe women's minds and avoid letting them influence
your own," he told the boy. "They live in a world of unrealities. They
like even vulgar people in books, but shrink from the simple, earthy folk
about them. That school teacher is so. Is she like me? Does she, while
loving books, love also the very smell of human life?"

In a way Telfer's attitude toward the kindly little school teacher became
Sam's attitude. Although they walked and talked together the course of
study she had planned for him he never took up and as he grew to know her
better, the books she read and the ideas she advanced appealed to him less
and less. He thought that she, as Telfer held, lived in a world of
illusion and unreality and said so. When she lent him books, he put them
in his pocket and did not read them. When he did read, he thought the
books reminded him of something that hurt him. They were in some way false
and pretentious. He thought they were like his father. One day he tried
reading aloud to Telfer from a book Mary Underwood had lent him.

The story was one of a poetic man with long, unclean fingernails who went
among people preaching the doctrine of beauty. It began with a scene on a
hillside in a rainstorm where the poetic man sat under a tent writing a
letter to his sweetheart.

Telfer was beside himself. Jumping from his seat under a tree by the
roadside he waved his arms and shouted:

"Stop! Stop it! Do not go on with it. The story lies. A man could not
write love letters under the circumstances and he was a fool to pitch his
tent on a hillside. A man in a tent on a hillside in a storm would be cold
and wet and getting the rheumatism. To be writing letters he would need to
be an unspeakable ass. He had better be out digging a trench to keep the
water from running through his tent."

Waving his arms, Telfer went off up the road and Sam followed thinking him
altogether right, and, if later in life he learned that there are men who
could write love letters on a piece of housetop in a flood, he did not
know it then and the least suggestion of windiness or pretence lay heavy
in his stomach.

Telfer had a vast enthusiasm for Bellamy's "Looking Backward," and read it
aloud to his wife on Sunday afternoons, sitting under the apple trees in
the garden. They had a fund of little personal jokes and sayings that they
were forever laughing over, and she had infinite delight in his comments
on the life and people of Caxton, but did not share his love of books.
When she sometimes went to sleep in her chair during the Sunday afternoon
readings he poked her with his cane and laughingly told her to wake up and
listen to the dream of a great dreamer. Among Browning's verses his
favourites were "A Light Woman" and "Fra Lippo Lippi," and he would recite
these aloud with great gusto. He declared Mark Twain the greatest man in
the world and in certain moods he would walk the road beside Sam reciting
over and over one or two lines of verse, often this from Poe:

  Helen, thy beauty is to me
  Like some Nicean bark of yore.

Then, stopping and turning upon the boy, he would demand whether or not
the writing of such lines wasn't worth living a life for.

Telfer had a pack of dogs that always went with them on their walks at
night and he had for them long Latin names that Sam could never remember.
One summer be bought a trotting mare from Lem McCarthy and gave great
attention to the colt, which he named Bellamy Boy, trotting him up and
down a little driveway by the side of his house for hours at a time and
declaring he would be a great trotting horse. He could recite the colt's
pedigree with great gusto and when he had been talking to Sam of some book
he would repay the boy's attention by saying, "You, my boy, are as far
superior to the run of boys about town as the colt, Bellamy Boy, is
superior to the farm horses that are hitched along Main Street on Saturday
afternoons." And then, with a wave of his hand and a look of much
seriousness on his face, he would add, "And for the same reason. You have
been, like him, under a master trainer of youth."

       *       *       *       *       *

One evening Sam, now grown to man's stature and full of the awkwardness
and self-consciousness of his new growth, was sitting on a cracker barrel
at the back of Wildman's grocery. It was a summer evening and a breeze
blew through the open doors swaying the hanging oil lamps that burned and
sputtered overhead. As usual he was listening in silence to the talk that
went on among the men.

Standing with legs wide apart and from time to time jabbing with his cane
at Sam's legs, John Telfer held forth on the subject of love.

"It is a theme that poets do well to write of," he declared. "In writing
of it they avoid the necessity of embracing it. In trying for a well-
turned line they forget to look at well-turned ankles. He who sings most
passionately of love has been in love the least; he woos the goddess of
poesy and only gets into trouble when he, like John Keats, turns to the
daughter of a villager and tries to live the lines he has written."

"Stuff and nonsense," roared Freedom Smith, who had been sitting tilted
far back in a chair with his feet against the cold stove, smoking a short,
black pipe, and who now brought his feet down upon the floor with a bang.
Admiring Telfer's flow of words he pretended to be filled with scorn. "The
night is too hot for eloquence," he bellowed. "If you must be eloquent
talk of ice cream or mint juleps or recite a verse about the old swimming
pool."

Telfer, wetting his finger, thrust it into the air.

"The wind is in the north-west; the beasts roar; we will have a storm," he
said, winking at Valmore.

Banker Walker came into the store, followed by his daughter. She was a
small, dark-skinned girl with black, quick eyes. Seeing Sam sitting with
swinging legs upon the cracker barrel she spoke to her father and went out
of the store. At the sidewalk she stopped and, turning, made a quick
motion with her hand.

Sam jumped off the cracker barrel and strolled toward the street door. A
flush was on his cheeks. His mouth felt hot and dry. He went with extreme
deliberateness, stopping to bow to the banker, and for a moment lingering
to read a newspaper that lay upon the cigar case, to avoid the comments he
feared his going might excite among the men by the stove. In his heart he
trembled lest the girl should have disappeared down the street, and with
his eyes, he looked guiltily at the banker, who had joined the group at
the back of the store and who now stood listening to the talk, while he
read from a list held in his hand and Wildman went here and there doing up
packages and repeating aloud the names of articles called off by the
banker.

At the end of the lighted business section of Main Street, Sam found the
girl waiting for him. She began to tell of the subterfuge by which she had
escaped her father.

"I told him I would go home with my sister," she said, tossing her head.

Taking hold of the boy's hand, she led him along the shaded street. For
the first time Sam walked in the company of one of the strange beings that
had begun to bring him uneasy nights, and overcome with the wonder of it
the blood climbed through his body and made his head reel so that he
walked in silence unable to understand his own emotions. He felt the soft
hand of the girl with delight; his heart pounded against the walls of his
chest and a choking sensation gripped at his throat.

Walking along the street, past lighted residences where the low voices of
women in talk greeted his ears, Sam was inordinately proud. He thought
that he should like to turn and walk with this girl through the lighted
Main Street. Had she not chosen him from among all the boys of the town;
had she not, with a flutter of her little, white hand, called to him with
a call that he wondered the men upon the cracker barrels had not heard?
Her boldness and his own took his breath away. He could not talk. His
tongue seemed paralysed.

Down the street went the boy and girl, loitering in the shadows, hurrying
past the dim oil lamps at street crossings, getting from each other wave
after wave of exquisite little thrills. Neither spoke. They were beyond
words. Had they not together done this daring thing?

In the shadow of a tree they stopped and stood facing each other; the girl
looked at the ground and stood facing the boy. Putting out his hand he
laid it upon her shoulder. In the darkness on the other side of the street
a man stumbled homeward along a board sidewalk. The lights of Main Street
glowed in the distance. Sam drew the girl toward him. She raised her head.
Their lips met, and then, throwing her arms about his neck, she kissed him
again and again eagerly.

       *       *       *       *       *

Sam's return to Wildman's was marked by extreme caution. Although he had
been absent but fifteen minutes it seemed to him that hours must have
passed and he would not have been surprised to see the stores locked and
darkness settled down on Main Street. It was inconceivable that the grocer
could still be wrapping packages for banker Walker. Worlds had been
remade. Manhood had come to him. Why! the man should have wrapped the
entire store, package after package, and sent it to the ends of the earth.
He lingered in the shadows at the first of the store lights where ages
before he had gone, a mere boy, to meet her, a mere girl, and looked with
wonder at the lighted way before him.

Sam crossed the street and, from the front of Sawyer's barber shop, looked
into Wildman's. He felt like a spy looking into the camp of an enemy.
There before him sat the men into whose midst he had it in his power to
cast a thunderbolt. He might walk to the door and say, truthfully enough,
"Here before you is a boy that by the flutter of a white hand has been
made into a man; here is one who has wrung the heart of womankind and
eaten his fill at the tree of the knowledge of life."

In the grocery the talk still continued among the men upon the cracker
barrels who seemed unconscious of the boy's slinking entrance. Indeed,
their talk had sunk. From talking of love and of poets they talked of corn
and of steers. Banker Walker, his packages of groceries lying on the
counter, smoked a cigar.

"You can fairly hear the corn growing to-night," he said. "It wants but
another shower or two and we shall have a record crop. I plan to feed a
hundred steers at my farm out Rabbit Road this winter."

The boy climbed again upon a cracker barrel and tried to look unconcerned
and interested in the talk. Still his heart thumped; still a throbbing
went on in his wrists. He turned and looked at the floor hoping his
agitation would pass unnoticed.

The banker, taking up the packages, walked out at the door. Valmore and
Freedom Smith went over to the livery barn for a game of pinochle. And
John Telfer, twirling his cane and calling to a troup of dogs that
loitered in an alley back of the store, took Sam for a walk into the
country.

"I will continue this talk of love," said Telfer, striking at weeds along
the road with his cane and from time to time calling sharply to the dogs
that, filled with delight at being abroad, ran growling and tumbling over
each other in the dusty road.

"That Freedom Smith is a sample of life in this town. At the word love he
drops his feet upon the floor and pretends to be filled with disgust. He
will talk of corn or steers or of the stinking hides that he buys, but at
the mention of the word love he is like a hen that has seen a hawk in the
sky. He runs about in circles making a fuss. 'Here! Here! Here!' he cries,
'you are making public something that should be kept hidden. You are doing
in the light of day what should only be done with a shamed face in a
darkened room.' Why, boy, if I were a woman in this town I would not stand
it--I would go to New York, to France, to Paris--To be wooed for but a
passing moment by a shame-faced yokel without art--uh--it is unthinkable."

The man and the boy walked in silence. The dogs, scenting a rabbit,
disappeared across a long pasture, their master letting them go. From time
to time he threw back his head and took long breaths of the night air.

"I am not like banker Walker," he declared. "He thinks of the growing corn
in terms of fat steers feeding on the Rabbit Run farm; I think of it as
something majestic. I see the long corn rows with the men and the horses
half hidden, hot and breathless, and I think of a vast river of life. I
catch a breath of the flame that was in the mind of the man who said, 'The
land is flowing with milk and honey.' I am made happy by my thoughts not
by the dollars clinking in my pocket.

"And then in the fall when the corn stands shocked I see another picture.
Here and there in companies stand the armies of the corn. It puts a ring
in my voice to look at them. 'These orderly armies has mankind brought out
of chaos,' I say to myself. 'On a smoking black ball flung by the hand of
God out of illimitable space has man stood up these armies to defend his
home against the grim attacking armies of want.'"

Telfer stopped and stood in the road with his legs spread apart. He took
off his hat and throwing back his head laughed up at the stars.

"Freedom Smith should hear me now," he cried, rocking back and forth with
laughter and switching his cane at the boy's legs so that Sam had to hop
merrily about in the road to avoid it. "Flung by the hand of God out of
illimitable space--eh! not bad, eh! I should be in Congress. I am wasted
here. I am throwing priceless eloquence to dogs who prefer to chase
rabbits and to a boy who is the worst little money grubber in the town."

The midsummer madness that had seized Telfer passed and for a time he
walked in silence. Suddenly, putting his arm on the boy's shoulder, he
stopped and pointed to where a faint light in the sky marked the lighted
town.

"They are good people," he said, "but their ways are not my ways or your
ways. You will go out of the town. You have genius. You will be a man of
finance. I have watched you. You are not niggardly and you do not cheat
and lie--result--you will not be a little business man. What have you? You
have the gift of seeing dollars where the rest of the boys of the town see
nothing and you are tireless after those dollars--you will be a big man of
dollars, it is plain." Into his voice came a touch of bitterness. "I also
was marked out. Why do I carry a cane? why do I not buy a farm and raise
steers? I am the most worthless thing alive. I have the touch of genius
without the energy to make it count."

Sam's mind that had been inflamed by the kiss of the girl cooled in the
presence of Telfer. In the summer madness of the talking man there was
something soothing to the fever in his blood. He followed the words
eagerly, seeing pictures, getting thrills, filled with happiness.

At the edge of town a buggy passed the walking pair. In the buggy sat a
young farmer, his arm about the waist of a girl, her head upon his
shoulder. Far in the distance sounded the faint call of the dogs. Sam and
Telfer sat down on a grassy bank under a tree while Telfer rolled and
lighted a cigarette.

"As I promised, I will talk to you of love," he said, making a wide sweep
with his arm each time as he put his cigarette into his mouth.

The grassy bank on which they lay had the rich, burned smell of the hot
days. A wind rustled the standing corn that formed a kind of wall behind
them. The moon was in the sky and shone down across bank after bank of
serried clouds. The grandiloquence went out of the voice of Telfer and his
face became serious.

"My foolishness is more than half earnest," he said. "I think that a man
or boy who has set for himself a task had better let women and girls
alone. If he be a man of genius, he has a purpose independent of all the
world, and should cut and slash and pound his way toward his mark,
forgetting every one, particularly the woman that would come to grips with
him. She also has a mark toward which she goes. She is at war with him and
has a purpose that is not his purpose. She believes that the pursuit of
women is an end for a life. For all they now condemn Mike McCarthy who
went to the asylum because of them and who, while loving life, came near
to taking life, the women of Caxton do not condemn his madness for
themselves; they do not blame him for loitering away his good years or for
making an abortive mess of his good brain. While he made an art of the
pursuit of women they applauded secretly. Did not twelve of them accept
the challenge thrown out by his eyes as he loitered in the streets?"

The man, who had begun talking quietly and seriously, raised his voice and
waved the lighted cigarette in the air and the boy who had begun to think
again of the dark-skinned daughter of banker Walker listened attentively.
The barking of the dogs grew nearer.

"If you as a boy can get from me, a grown man, an understanding of the
purpose of women you will not have lived in this town for nothing. Set
your mark at money making if you will, but drive at that. Let yourself but
go and a sweet wistful pair of eyes seen in a street crowd or a pair of
little feet running over a dance floor will retard your growth for years.
No man or boy can grow toward the purpose of a life while he thinks of
women. Let him try it and he will be undone. What is to him a passing
humour is to them an end. They are diabolically clever. They will run and
stop and run and stop again, keeping just without his reach. He sees them
here and there about him. His mind is filled with vague, delicious
thoughts that come out of the very air; before he realises what he has
done he has spent his years in vain pursuit and turning finds himself old
and undone."

Telfer began jabbing at the ground with his stick.

"I had my chance. In New York I had money to live on and time to have made
an artist of myself. I won prize after prize. The master, walking up and
down back of us, lingered longest over my easel. There was a fellow sat
beside me who had nothing. I made sport of him and called him Sleepy Jock
after a dog we used to have about our house here in Caxton. Now I am here
idly waiting for death and that Jock, where is he? Only last week I saw in
a paper that he had won a place among the world's great artists by a
picture he has painted. In the school I watched for a look in the eyes of
the girl students and went about with them night after night winning, like
Mike McCarthy, fruitless victories. Sleepy Jock had the best of it. He did
not look about with open eyes but kept peering instead at the face of the
master. My days were full of small successes. I could wear clothes. I
could make soft-eyed girls turn to look at me in a dance hall. I remember
a night. We students gave a dance and Sleepy Jock came. He went about
asking for dances and the girls laughed and told him they had none to
give, that the dances were taken. I followed him and had my ears filled
with flattery and my card with names. In riding the wave of small success
I got the habit of small success. When I could not catch the line I wanted
to make a drawing live, I dropped my pencil and, taking a girl upon my
arm, went for a day in the country. Once, sitting in a restaurant, I
overheard two women talking of the beauty of my eyes and was made happy
for a week."

Telfer threw up his hands in disgust.

"My flow of words, my ready trick of talking; to what does it bring me?
Let me tell you. It has brought me to this--that at fifty I, who might
have been an artist fixing the minds of thousands upon some thing of
beauty or of truth, have become a village cut-up, a pot-house wit, a
flinger of idle words into the air of a village intent upon raising corn.

"If you ask me why, I tell you that my mind was paralysed by small success
and if you ask me where I got the taste for that, I tell you that I got it
when I saw it lurking in a woman's eyes and heard the pleasant little
songs that lull to sleep upon a woman's lips."

The boy, sitting upon the grassy bank beside Telfer, began thinking of
life in Caxton. The man smoking the cigarette fell into one of his rare
silences. The boy thought of girls that had come into his mind at night,
of how he had been thrilled by a glance from the eyes of a little blue-
eyed school girl who had once visited at Freedom Smith's home and of how
he had gone at night to stand under her window.

In Caxton adolescent love had about it a virility befitting a land that
raised so many bushels of yellow corn and drove so many fat steers through
the streets to be loaded upon cars. Men and women went their ways
believing, with characteristic American what-boots-it attitude toward the
needs of childhood, that it was well for growing boys and girls to be much
alone together. To leave them alone together was a principle with them.
When a young man called upon his sweetheart, her parents sat in the
presence of the two with apologetic eyes and presently disappeared leaving
them alone together. When boys' and girls' parties were given in Caxton
houses, parents went away leaving the children to shift for themselves.

"Now have a good time and don't tear the house down," they said, going off
upstairs.

Left to themselves the children played kissing games and young men and
tall half-formed girls sat on the front porches in the darkness, thrilled
and half frightened, getting through their instincts, crudely and without
guidance, their first peep at the mystery of life. They kissed
passionately and the young men, walking home, lay upon their beds fevered
and unnaturally aroused, thinking thoughts.

Young men went into the company of girls time and again without knowing
aught of them except that they caused a stirring of their whole being, a
kind of riot of the senses to which they returned on other evenings as a
drunkard to his cups. After such an evening they found themselves, on the
next morning, confused and filled with vague longings. They had lost their
keenness for fun, they heard without hearing the talk of the men about the
station and in the stores, they went slinking through the streets in
groups and people seeing them nodded their heads and said, "It is the
loutish age."

If Sam did not have a loutish age it was due to his tireless struggle to
increase the totals at the foot of the pages in the yellow bankbook, to
the growing ill health of his mother that had begun to frighten him, and
to the society of Valmore, Wildman, Freedom Smith, and the man who now sat
musing beside him. He began to think he would have nothing more to do with
the Walker girl. He remembered his sister's affair with a young farmer and
shuddered at the crude vulgarity of it. He looked over the shoulder of the
man sitting beside him absorbed in thought, and saw the rolling fields
stretched away in the moonlight and into his mind came Telfer's speech. So
vivid, so moving, seemed the picture of the armies of standing corn which
men had set up in the fields to protect themselves against the march of
pitiless Nature, and Sam, holding the picture in his mind as he followed
the sense of Telfer's talk, thought that all society had resolved itself
into a few sturdy souls who went on and on regardless, and a hunger to
make of himself such another arose engulfing him. The desire within him
seemed so compelling that he turned and haltingly tried to express what
was in his mind.

"I will try," he stammered, "I will try to be a man. I will try to not
have anything to do with them--with women. I will work and make money--
and--and----"

Speech left him. He rolled over and lying on his stomach looked at the
ground.

"To Hell with women and girls," he burst forth as though throwing
something distasteful out of his throat.

In the road a clamour arose. The dogs, giving up the pursuit of rabbits,
came barking and growling into sight and scampered up the grassy bank,
covering the man and the boy. Shaking off the reaction upon his sensitive
nature of the emotions of the boy Telfer arose. His _sang froid_ had
returned to him. Cutting right and left with his stick at the dogs he
cried joyfully, "We have had enough of eloquence from man, boy, and dog.
We will be on our way. We will get this boy Sam home and tucked into bed."




CHAPTER V


Sam was a half-grown man of fifteen when the call of the city came to him.
For six years he had been upon the streets. He had seen the sun come up
hot and red over the corn fields, and had stumbled through the streets in
the bleak darkness of winter mornings, when the trains from the north came
into Caxton covered with ice, and the trainmen stood on the deserted
little platform whipping their arms and calling to Jerry Donlin to hurry
with his work that they might get back into the warm stale air of the
smoking car.

In the six years the boy had grown more and more determined to become a
man of money. Fed by banker Walker, the silent mother, and in some subtle
way by the very air he breathed, the belief within him that to make money
and to have money would in some way make up for the old half-forgotten
humiliations in the life of the McPherson family and would set it on a
more secure foundation than the wobbly Windy had provided, grew and
influenced his thoughts and his acts. Tirelessly he kept at his efforts to
get ahead. In his bed at night he dreamed of dollars. Jane McPherson had
herself a passion for frugality. In spite of Windy's incompetence and her
own growing ill health, she would not permit the family to go into debt,
and although, in the long hard winters, Sam sometimes ate cornmeal mush
until his mind revolted at the thought of a corn field, yet was the rent
of the little house paid on the scratch, and her boy fairly driven to
increase the totals in the yellow bankbook. Even Valmore, who since the
death of his wife had lived in a loft above his shop and who was a
blacksmith of the old days, a workman first and a money maker later, did
not despise the thought of gain.

"It is money makes the mare go," he said with a kind of reverence as
banker Walker, fat, sleek, and prosperous, walked pompously out of
Wildman's grocery.

Of John Telfer's attitude toward money-making, the boy was uncertain. The
man followed with joyous abandonment the impulse of the moment.

"That's right," he cried impatiently when Sam, who had begun to express
opinions at the gatherings in the grocery, pointed out hesitatingly that
the papers took account of men of wealth no matter what their
achievements, "Make money! Cheat! Lie! Be one of the men of the big world!
Get your name up for a modern, high-class American!"

And in the next breath, turning upon Freedom Smith who had begun to berate
the boy for not sticking to the schools and who predicted that the day
would come when Sam would regret his lack of book learning, he shouted,
"Let the schools go! They are but musty beds in which old clerkliness lies
asleep!"

Among the travelling men who came to Caxton to sell goods, the boy, who
had continued the paper selling even after attaining the stature of a man,
was a favourite. Sitting in chairs before the New Leland House they talked
to him of the city and of the money to be made there.

"It is the place for a live young man," they said.

Sam had a talent for drawing people into talk of themselves and of their
affairs and began to cultivate travelling men. From them, he got into his
nostrils a whiff of the city and, listening to them, he saw the great ways
filled with hurrying people, the tall buildings touching the sky, the men
running about intent upon money-making, and the clerks going on year after
year on small salaries getting nowhere, a part of, and yet not
understanding, the impulses and motives of the enterprises that supported
them.

In this picture Sam thought he saw a place for himself. He conceived of
life in the city as a great game in which he believed he could play a
sterling part. Had he not in Caxton brought something out of nothing, had
he not systematised and monopolised the selling of papers, had he not
introduced the vending of popcorn and peanuts from baskets to the Saturday
night crowds? Already boys went out in his employ, already the totals in
the bank book had crept to more than seven hundred dollars. He felt within
him a glow of pride at the thought of what he had done and would do.

"I will be richer than any man in town here," he declared in his pride. "I
will be richer than Ed Walker."

Saturday night was the great night in Caxton life. For it the clerks in
the stores prepared, for it Sam sent forth his peanut and popcorn venders,
for it Art Sherman rolled up his sleeves and put the glasses close by the
beer tap under the bar, and for it the mechanics, the farmers, and the
labourers dressed in their Sunday best and came forth to mingle with their
fellows. On Main Street crowds packed the stores, the sidewalks, and
drinking places, and men stood about in groups talking while young girls
with their lovers walked up and down. In the hall over Geiger's drug store
a dance went on and the voice of the caller-off rose above the clatter of
voices and the stamping of horses in the street. Now and then a fight
broke out among the roisterers in Piety Hollow. Once a young farm hand was
killed with a knife.

In and out through the crowd Sam went, pressing his wares.

"Remember the long quiet Sunday afternoon," he said, pushing a paper into
the hands of a slow-thinking farmer. "Recipes for cooking new dishes," he
urged to the farmer's wife. "There is a page of new fashions in dress," he
told the young girl.

Not until the last light was out in the last saloon in Piety Hollow, and
the last roisterer had driven off into the darkness carrying a Saturday
paper in his pocket, did Sam close the day's business.

And it was on a Saturday night that he decided to drop paper selling.

"I will take you into business with me," announced Freedom Smith, stopping
him as he hurried by. "You are getting too old to sell papers and you know
too much."

Sam, still intent upon the money to be made on that particular Saturday
night, did not stop to discuss the matter with Freedom, but for a year he
had been looking quietly about for something to go into and now he nodded
his head as he hurried away.

"It is the end of romance," shouted Telfer, who stood beside Freedom Smith
before Geiger's drug store and who had heard the offer. "A boy, who has
seen the secret workings of my mind, who has heard me spout Poe and
Browning, will become a merchant, dealing in stinking hides. I am overcome
by the thought."

The next day, sitting in the garden back of his house, Telfer talked to
Sam of the matter at length.

"For you, my boy, I put the matter of money in the first place," he
declared, leaning back in his chair, smoking a cigarette and from time to
time tapping Eleanor on the shoulder with his cane. "For any boy I put
money-making in the first place. It is only women and fools who despise
money-making. Look at Eleanor here. The time and thought she puts into the
selling of hats would be the death of me, but it has been the making of
her. See how fine and purposeful she has become. Without the millinery
business she would be a purposeless fool intent upon clothes and with it
she is all a woman should be. It is like a child to her."

Eleanor, who had turned to laugh at her husband, looked instead at the
ground and a shadow crossed her face. Telfer, who had begun talking
thoughtlessly, out of his excess of words, glanced from the woman to the
boy. He knew that the suggestion regarding a child had touched a secret
regret in Eleanor, and began trying to efface the shadow on her face by
throwing himself into the subject that chanced to be on his tongue, making
the words roll and tumble from his lips.

"No matter what may come in the future, in our day money-making precedes
many virtues that are forever on men's lips," he declared fiercely as
though trying to down an opponent. "It is one of the virtues that proves
man not a savage. It has lifted him up--not money-making, but the power to
make money. Money makes life livable. It gives freedom and destroys fear.
Having it means sanitary houses and well-made clothes. It brings into
men's lives beauty and the love of beauty. It enables a man to go
adventuring after the stuff of life as I have done.

"Writers are fond of telling stories of the crude excesses of great
wealth," he went on hurriedly, glancing again at Eleanor. "No doubt the
things they tell of do happen. Money, and not the ability and the instinct
to make money, is at fault. And what of the cruder excesses of poverty,
the drunken men who beat and starve their families, the grim silences of
the crowded, unsanitary houses of the poor, the inefficient, and the
defeated? Go sit around the lounging room of the most vapid rich man's
city club as I have done, and then sit among the workers of a factory at
the noon hour. Virtue, you will find, is no fonder of poverty than you and
I, and the man who has merely learned to be industrious, and who has not
acquired that eager hunger and shrewdness that enables him to get on, may
build up a strong dexterous body while his mind is diseased and decaying."

Grasping his cane and beginning to be carried away by the wind of his
eloquence Telfer forgot Eleanor and talked for his love of talking.

"The mind that has in it the love of the beautiful, that stuff that makes
our poets, artists, musicians, and actors, needs this turn for shrewd
money getting or it will destroy itself," he declared. "And the really
great artists have it. In books and stories the great men starve in
garrets. In real life they are more likely to ride in carriages on Fifth
Avenue and have country places on the Hudson. Go, see for yourself. Visit
the starving genius in his garret. It is a hundred to one that you will
find him not only incapable in money getting but also incapable in the
very art for which he starves."

After the hurried word from Freedom Smith, Sam began looking for a buyer
for the paper business. The place offered appealed to him and he wanted a
chance at it. In the buying of potatoes, butter, eggs, apples, and hides
he thought he could make money, also, he knew that the dogged persistency
with which he had kept at the putting of money in the bank had caught
Freedom's imagination, and he wanted to take advantage of the fact.

Within a few days the deal was made. Sam got three hundred and fifty
dollars for the list of newspaper customers, the peanut and popcorn
business and the transfer of the exclusive agencies he had arranged with
the dailies of Des Moines and St. Louis. Two boys bought the business,
backed by their fathers. A talk in the back room of the bank, with the
cashier telling of Sam's record as a depositor, and the seven hundred
dollars surplus clinched the deal. When it came to the deal with Freedom,
Sam took him into the back room at the bank and showed his savings as he
had shown them to the fathers of the two boys. Freedom was impressed. He
thought the boy would make money for him. Twice within a week Sam had seen
the silent suggestive power of cash.

The deal Sam made with Freedom included a fair weekly wage, enough to more
than take care of all his wants, and in addition he was to have two-thirds
of all he saved Freedom in the buying. Freedom on the other hand was to
furnish horse, vehicle, and keep for the horse, while Sam was to take care
of the horse. The prices to be paid for the things bought were to be fixed
each morning by Freedom, and if Sam bought at less than the prices named
two-thirds of the savings went to him. The arrangement was suggested by
Sam, who thought he would make more from the saving than from the wage.

Freedom Smith discussed even the most trivial matter in a loud voice,
roaring and shouting in the store and on the streets. He was a great
inventor of descriptive names, having a name of his own for every man,
woman and child he knew and liked. "Old Maybe-Not" he called Windy
McPherson and would roar at him in the grocery asking him not to shed
rebel blood in the sugar barrel. He drove about the country in a low
phaeton buggy that rattled and squeaked enormously and had a wide rip in
the top. To Sam's knowledge neither the buggy nor Freedom were washed
during his stay with the man. He had a method of his own in buying.
Stopping in front of a farm house he would sit in his buggy and roar until
the farmer came out of the field or the house to talk with him. And then
haggling and shouting he would make his deal or drive on his way while the
farmer, leaning on the fence, laughed as at a wayward child.

Freedom lived in a large old brick house facing one of Caxton's best
streets. His house and yard were an eyesore to his neighbours who liked
him personally. He knew this and would stand on his front porch laughing
and roaring about it. "Good morning, Mary," he would shout at the neat
German woman across the street. "Wait and you'll see me clean up about
here. I'm going at it right now. I'm going to brush the flies off the
fence first."

Once he ran for a county office and got practically every vote in the
county.

Freedom had a passion for buying up old half-worn buggies and agricultural
implements, bringing them home to stand in the yard, gathering rust and
decay, and swearing they were as good as new. In the lot were a half dozen
buggies and a family carriage or two, a traction engine, a mowing machine,
several farm wagons and other farm tools gone beyond naming. Every few
days he came home bringing a new prize. They overflowed the yard and crept
onto the porch. Sam never knew him to sell any of this stuff. He had at
one time sixteen sets of harness all broken and unrepaired in the barn and
in a shed back of the house. A great flock of chickens and two or three
pigs wandered about among this junk and all the children of the
neighbourhood joined Freedom's four and ran howling and shouting over and
under the mass.

Freedom's wife, a pale, silent woman, rarely came out of the house. She
had a liking for the industrious, hard-working Sam and occasionally stood
at the back door and talked with him in a low, even voice at evening as he
stood unhitching his horse after a day on the road. Both she and Freedom
treated him with great respect.

As a buyer Sam was even more successful than at the paper selling. He was
a buyer by instinct, working a wide stretch of country very systematically
and within a year more than doubling the bulk of Freedom's purchases.

There is a little of Windy McPherson's grotesque pretentiousness in every
man and his son soon learned to look for and to take advantage of it. He
let men talk until they had exaggerated or overstated the value of their
goods, then called them sharply to accounts, and before they had recovered
from their confusion drove home the bargain. In Sam's day, farmers did not
watch the daily market reports, in fact, the markets were not systematised
and regulated as they were later, and the skill of the buyer was of the
first importance. Having the skill, Sam used it constantly to put money
into his pockets, but in some way kept the confidence and respect of the
men with whom he traded.

The noisy, blustering Freedom was as proud as a father of the trading
ability that developed in the boy and roared his name up and down the
streets and in the stores, declaring him the smartest boy in Iowa.

"Mighty little of old Maybe-Not in that boy," he would shout to the
loafers in the store.

Although Sam had an almost painful desire for order and system in his own
affairs, he did not try to bring these influences into Freedom's affairs,
but kept his own records carefully and bought potatoes and apples, butter
and eggs, furs and hides, with untiring zeal, working always to swell his
commissions. Freedom took the risks in the business and many times
profited little, but the two liked and respected each other and it was
through Freedom's efforts that Sam finally got out of Caxton and into
larger affairs.

One evening in the late fall Freedom came into the stable where Sam stood
taking the harness off his horse.

"Here is a chance for you, my boy," he said, putting his hand
affectionately on Sam's shoulder. There was a note of tenderness in his
voice. He had written to the Chicago firm to whom he sold most of the
things he bought, telling of Sam and his ability, and the firm had replied
making an offer that Sam thought far beyond anything he might hope for in
Caxton. In his hand he held this offer.

When Sam read the letter his heart jumped. He thought that it opened for
him a wide new field of effort and of money making. He thought that at
last he had come to the end of his boyhood and was to have his chance in
the city. Only that morning old Doctor Harkness had stopped him at the
door as he set out for work and, pointing over his shoulder with his thumb
to where in the house his mother lay, wasted and asleep, had told him that
in another week she would be gone, and Sam, heavy of heart and filled with
uneasy longing, had walked through the streets to Freedom's stable wishing
that he also might be gone.

Now he walked across the stable floor and hung the harness he had taken
from the horse upon a peg in the wall.

"I will be glad to go," he said heavily.

Freedom walked out of the stable door beside the young McPherson who had
come to him as a boy and was now a broad-shouldered young man of eighteen.
He did not want to lose Sam. He had written the Chicago company because of
his affection for the boy and because he believed him capable of something
more than Caxton offered. Now he walked in silence holding the lantern
aloft and guiding the way among the wreckage in the yard, filled with
regrets.

By the back door of the house stood the pale, tired-looking wife who,
putting out her hand, took the hand of the boy. There were tears in her
eyes. And then saying nothing Sam turned and hurried off up the street,
Freedom and his wife walked to the front gate and watched him go. From a
street corner, where he stopped in the shadow of a tree, Sam could see
them there, the wind swinging the lantern in Freedom's hand and the
slender little old wife making a white blotch against the darkness.




CHAPTER VI


Sam went along the board sidewalk homeward bound, hurried by the driving
March wind that had sent the lantern swinging in Freedom's hand. At the
front of a white frame residence a grey-haired old man stood leaning on
the gate and looking at the sky.

"We shall have a rain," he said in a quavering voice, as though giving a
decision in the matter, and then turned and without waiting for an answer
went along a narrow path into the house.

The incident brought a smile to Sam's lips followed by a kind of weariness
of mind. Since the beginning of his work with Freedom he had, day after
day, come upon Henry Kimball standing by his gate and looking at the sky.
The man was one of Sam's old newspaper customers who stood as a kind of
figure in the town. It was said of him that in his youth he had been a
gambler on the Mississippi River and that he had taken part in more than
one wild adventure in the old days. After the Civil War he had come to end
his days in Caxton, living alone and occupying himself by keeping year
after year a carefully tabulated record of weather variations. Once or
twice a month during the warm season he stumbled into Wildman's and,
sitting by the stove, talked boastfully of the accuracy of his records and
the doings of a mangy dog that trotted at his heels. In his present mood
the endless sameness and uneventfulness of the man's life seemed to Sam
amusing and in some way sad.

"To depend upon going to the gate and looking at the sky to give point to
a day--to look forward to and depend upon that--what deadliness!" he
thought, and, thrusting his hand into his pocket, felt with pleasure the
letter from the Chicago company that was to open so much of the big
outside world to him.

In spite of the shock of unexpected sadness that had come with what he
felt was almost a definite parting with Freedom, and the sadness brought
on by his mother's approaching death, Sam felt a strong thrill of
confidence in his own future that made his homeward walk almost cheerful.
The thrill got from reading the letter handed him by Freedom was renewed
by the sight of old Henry Kimball at the gate, looking at the sky.

"I shall never be like that, sitting in a corner of the world watching a
mangy dog chase a ball and peering day after day at a thermometer," he
thought.

The three years in Freedom Smith's service had taught Sam not to doubt his
ability to cope with such business problems as might come in his way. He
knew that he had become what he wanted to be, a good business man, one of
the men who direct and control the affairs in which they are concerned
because of a quality in them called Business Sense. He recalled with
pleasure the fact that the men of Caxton had stopped calling him a bright
boy and now spoke of him as a good business man.

At the gate before his own house he stopped and stood thinking of these
things and of the dying woman within. Back into his mind came the old man
he had seen at the gate and with him the thought that his mother's life
had been as barren as that of the man who depended for companionship upon
a dog and a thermometer.

"Indeed," he said to himself, pursuing the thought, "it has been worse.
She has not had a fortune on which to live in peace nor has she had the
remembrance of youthful days of wild adventure that must comfort the last
days of the old man. Instead she has been watching me as the old man
watches his thermometer and Father has been the dog in her house chasing
playthings." The figure pleased him. He stood at the gate, the wind
singing in the trees along the street and driving an occasional drop of
rain against his cheek, and thought of it and of his life with his mother.
During the last two or three years he had been trying to make things up to
her. After the sale of the newspaper business and the beginning of his
success with Freedom he had driven her from the washtub and since the
beginning of her ill health he had spent evening after evening with her
instead of going to Wildman's to sit with the four friends and hear the
talk that went on among them. No more did he walk with Telfer or Mary
Underwood on country roads but sat, instead, by the bedside of the sick
woman or, the night falling fair, helped her to an arm chair upon the
grass plot at the front of the house.

The years, Sam felt, had been good years. They had brought him an
understanding of his mother and had given a seriousness and purpose to the
ambitious plans he continued to make for himself. Alone together, the
mother and he had talked little, the habit of a lifetime making much
speech impossible to her and the growing understanding of her making it
unnecessary to him. Now in the darkness, before the house, he thought of
the evenings he had spent with her and of the pitiful waste that had been
made of her fine life. Things that had hurt him and against which he had
been bitter and unforgiving became of small import, even the doings of the
pretentious Windy, who in the face of Jane's illness continued to go off
after pension day for long periods of drunkenness, and who only came home
to weep and wail through the house, when the pension money was gone,
regretting, Sam tried in fairness to think, the loss of both the washwoman
and the wife.

"She has been the most wonderful woman in the world," he told himself and
tears of happiness came into his eyes at the thought of his friend, John
Telfer, who in bygone days had praised the mother to the newsboy trotting
beside him on moonlit roads. Into his mind came a picture of her long
gaunt face, ghastly now against the white of the pillows. A picture of
George Eliot, tacked to the wall behind a broken harness in the kitchen of
Freedom Smith's house, had caught his eye some days before, and in the
darkness he took it from his pocket and put it to his lips, realising that
in some indescribable way it was like his mother as she had been before
her illness. Freedom's wife had given him the picture and he had been
carrying it, taking it out of his pocket on lonely stretches of road as he
went about his work.

Sam went quietly around the house and stood by an old shed, a relic of an
attempt by Windy to embark in raising chickens. He wanted to continue the
thoughts of his mother. He began recalling her youth and the details of a
long talk they had held together on the lawn before the house. It was
extraordinarily vivid in his mind. He thought that even now he could
remember every word that had been said. The sick woman had talked of her
youth in Ohio, and as she talked pictures had come into the boy's mind.
She had told him of her days as a bound girl in the family of a thin-
lipped, hard-fisted New Englander, who had come West to take a farm, and
of her struggles to obtain an education, of the pennies saved to buy
books, of her joy when she had passed examinations and become a school
teacher, and of her marriage to Windy--then John McPherson.

Into the Ohio village the young McPherson had come, to cut a figure in the
town's life. Sam had smiled at the picture she drew of the young man who
walked up and down the village street with girls on his arms, and who
taught a Bible class in the Sunday school.

When Windy proposed to the young school teacher she had accepted him
eagerly, thinking it unbelievably romantic that so dashing a man should
have chosen so obscure a figure among all the women of the town.

"And even now I am not sorry although it has meant nothing but labour and
unhappiness for me," the sick woman had told her son.

After marriage to the young dandy, Jane had come with him to Caxton where
he bought a store and where, within three years, he had put the store into
the sheriff's hands and his wife into the position of town laundress.

In the darkness a grim smile, half scorn, half amusement, had flitted
across the face of the dying woman as she told of a winter when Windy and
another young fellow went, from schoolhouse to schoolhouse, over the state
giving a show. The ex-soldier had become a singer of comic songs and had
written letter after letter to the young wife telling of the applause that
greeted his efforts. Sam could picture the performances, the little dimly-
lighted schoolhouses with the weatherbeaten faces shining in the light of
the leaky magic lantern, and the delighted Windy running here and there,
talking the jargon of stageland, arraying himself in his motley and
strutting upon the little stage.

"And all winter he did not send me a penny," the sick woman had said,
interrupting his thoughts.

Aroused at last to expression, and filled with the memory of her youth,
the silent woman had talked of her own people. Her father had been killed
in the woods by a falling tree. Of her mother she told an anecdote,
touching it briefly and with a grim humour that surprised her son.

The young school teacher had gone to call upon her mother once and for an
hour had sat in the parlour of an Ohio farmhouse while a fierce old woman
looked at her with bold questioning eyes that made the daughter feel she
had been a fool to come.

At the railroad station she had heard an anecdote of her mother. The story
ran, that once a burly tramp came to the farmhouse, and finding the woman
alone tried to bully her, and that the tramp, and the woman, then in her
prime, fought for an hour in the back yard of the house. The railroad
agent, who told Jane the story, threw back his head and laughed.

"She knocked him out, too," he said, "knocked him cold upon the ground and
then filled him up with hard cider so that he came reeling into town
declaring her the finest woman in the state."

In the darkness by the broken shed Sam's mind turned from thoughts of his
mother to his sister Kate and of her love affair with the young farmer. He
thought with sadness of how she too had suffered because of the failings
of the father, of how she had been compelled to go out of the house to
wander in the dark streets to avoid the endless evenings of war talk
always brought on by a guest in the McPherson household, and of the night
when, getting a rig from Culvert's livery, she had driven off alone into
the country to return in triumph to pack her clothes and show her wedding
ring.

Before him there rose a picture of a summer afternoon when he had seen a
part of the love making that had preceded this. He had gone into the store
to see his sister when the young farmer came in, looked awkwardly about
and pushed a new gold watch across the counter to Kate. A sudden wave of
respect for his sister had pervaded the boy. "What a sum it must have
cost," he thought, and looked with new interest at the back of the lover
and at the flushed cheek and shining eyes of his sister. When the lover,
turning, had seen young McPherson standing at the counter, he laughed
self-consciously and walked out at the door. Kate had been embarrassed and
secretly pleased and flattered by the look in her brother's eyes, but had
pretended to treat the gift lightly, twirling it carelessly back and forth
on the counter and walking up and down swinging her arms.

"Don't go telling," she had said.

"Then don't go pretending," the boy had answered.

Sam thought that his sister's indiscretion, which had brought her a babe
and a husband in the same month had, after all, ended better than the
indiscretion of his mother in her marriage with Windy.

Rousing himself, he went into the house. A neighbour woman, employed for
the purpose, had prepared the evening meal and now began complaining of
his lateness, saying that the food had got cold.

Sam ate in silence. While he ate the woman went out of the house and
presently returned, bringing a daughter.

There was in Caxton a code that would not allow a woman to be alone in a
house with a man. Sam wondered if the bringing of the daughter was an
attempt on the part of the woman to abide by the letter of the code, if
she thought of the sick woman in the house as one already gone. The
thought amused and saddened him.

"You would have thought her safe," he mused. She was fifty, small, nervous
and worn and wore a set of ill-fitting false teeth that rattled as she
talked. When she did not talk she rattled them with her tongue because of
nervousness.

In at the kitchen door came Windy, far gone in drink. He stood by the door
holding to the knob with his hand and trying to get control of himself.

"My wife--my wife is dying. She may die any day," he wailed, tears
standing in his eyes.

The woman with the daughter went into the little parlour where a bed had
been put for the sick woman. Sam sat at the kitchen table dumb with anger
and disgust as Windy, lurching forward, fell into a chair and began
sobbing loudly. In the road outside a man driving a horse stopped and Sam
could hear the scraping of the wheels against the buggy body as the man
turned in the narrow street. Above the scraping of the wheels rose a
voice, swearing profanely. The wind continued to blow and it had begun to
rain.

"He has got into the wrong street," thought the boy stupidly.

Windy, his head upon his hands, wept like a brokenhearted boy, his sobs
echoing through the house, his breath heavy with liquor tainting the air
of the room. In a corner by the stove the mother's ironing board stood
against the wall and the sight of it added fuel to the anger smouldering
in Sam's heart. He remembered the day when he had stood in the store
doorway with his mother and had seen the dismal and amusing failure of his
father with the bugle, and of the months before Kate's wedding, when Windy
had gone blustering about town threatening to kill her lover and the
mother and boy had stayed with the girl, out of sight in the house, sick
with humiliation.

The drunken man, laying his head upon the table, fell asleep, his snores
replacing the sobs that had stirred the boy's anger. Sam began thinking
again of his mother's life.

The effort he had made to repay her for the hardness of her life now
seemed utterly fruitless. "I would like to repay him," he thought, shaken
with a sudden spasm of hatred as he looked at the man before him. The
cheerless little kitchen, the cold, half-baked potatoes and sausages on
the table, and the drunken man asleep, seemed to him a kind of symbol of
the life that had been lived in that house, and with a shudder he turned
his face and stared at the wall.

He thought of a dinner he had once eaten at Freedom Smith's house. Freedom
had brought the invitation into the stables on that night just as to-night
he had brought the letter from the Chicago company, and just as Sam was
shaking his head in refusal of the invitation in at the stable door had
come the children. Led by the eldest, a great tomboy girl of fourteen with
the strength of a man and an inclination to burst out of her clothes at
unexpected places, they had come charging into the stables to carry Sam
off to the dinner, Freedom laughingly urging them on, his voice roaring in
the stable so that the horses jumped about in their stalls. Into the house
they had dragged him, the baby, a boy of four, sitting astride his back
and beating on his head with a woollen cap, and Freedom swinging a lantern
and giving an occasional helpful push with his hand.

A picture of the long table covered with the white cloth at the end of the
big dining room in Freedom's house came back into the mind of the boy now
sitting in the barren little kitchen before the untasted, badly-cooked
food. Upon it lay a profusion of bread and meat and great dishes heaped
with steaming potatoes. At his own house there had always been just enough
food for the single meal. The thing was nicely calculated, when you had
finished the table was bare.

How he had enjoyed that dinner after the long day on the road. With a
flourish and a roar at the children Freedom heaped high the plates and
passed them about, the wife or the tomboy girl bringing unending fresh
supplies from the kitchen. The joy of the evening with its talk of the
children in school, its sudden revelation of the womanliness of the tomboy
girl, and its air of plenty and good living haunted the mind of the boy.

"My mother never knew anything like that," he thought.

The drunken man who had been sleeping aroused himself and began talking
loudly--some old forgotten grievance coming back to his mind, he talked of
the cost of school books.

"They change the books in the school too often," he declared in a loud
voice, turning and facing the kitchen stove, as though addressing an
audience. "It is a scheme to graft on old soldiers who have children. I
will not stand it."

Sam, enraged beyond speech, tore a leaf from a notebook and scrawled a
message upon it.

"Be silent," he wrote. "If you say another word or make another sound to
disturb mother I will choke you and throw you like a dead dog into the
street."

Reaching across the table and touching his father on the hand with a fork
taken from among the dishes, he laid the note upon the table under the
lamp before his eyes. He was fighting with himself to control a desire to
spring across the room and kill the man who he believed had brought his
mother to her death and who now sat bellowing and talking at her very
death bed. The desire distorted his mind so that he stared about the
kitchen like one seized with an insane nightmare.

Windy, taking the note in his hand, read it slowly and then, not
understanding its import and but half getting its sense, put it in his
pocket.

"A dog is dead, eh?" he shouted. "Well you're getting too big and smart,
lad. What do I care for a dead dog?"

Sam did not answer. Rising cautiously, he crept around the table and put
his hand upon the throat of the babbling old man.

"I must not kill," he kept telling himself aloud, as though talking to a
stranger. "I must choke until he is silent, but I must not kill."

In the kitchen the two men struggled silently. Windy, unable to rise,
struck out wildly and helplessly with his feet. Sam, looking down at him
and studying the eyes and the colour in the cheeks, realised with a start
that he had not for years seen the face of his father. How vividly it
stamped itself upon his mind now, and how coarse and sodden it had become.

"I could repay all of the years mother has spent over the dreary washtub
by just one long, hard grip at this lean throat. I could kill him with so
little extra pressure," he thought.

The eyes began to stare at him and the tongue to protrude. Across the
forehead ran a streak of mud picked up somewhere in the long afternoon of
drunken carousing.

"If I were to press hard now and kill him I would see his face as it looks
now all the days of my life," thought the boy.

In the silence of the house he heard the voice of the neighbour woman
speaking sharply to her daughter. The familiar, dry, tired cough of the
sick woman followed. Sam took the unconscious old man in his arms and went
carefully and silently out at the kitchen door. The rain beat down upon
him and, as he went around the house with his burden, the wind, shaking
loose a dead branch from a small apple tree in the yard, blew it against
his face, leaving a long smarting scratch. At the fence before the house
he stopped and threw his burden down a short grassy bank into the road.
Then turning he went, bareheaded, through the gate and up the street.

"I will go for Mary Underwood," he thought, his mind returning to the
friend who years before had walked with him on country roads and whose
friendship he had dropped because of John Telfer's tirades against all
women. He stumbled along the sidewalk, the rain beating down upon his bare
head.

"We need a woman in our house," he kept saying over and over to himself.
"We need a woman in our house."




CHAPTER VII


Leaning against the wall under the veranda of Mary Underwood's house, Sam
tried to get in his mind a remembrance of what had brought him there. He
had walked bareheaded through Main Street and out along a country road.
Twice he had fallen, covering his clothes with mud. He had forgotten the
purpose of his walk and had tramped on and on. The unexpected and terrible
hatred of his father that had come upon him in the tense silence of the
kitchen had so paralysed his brain that he now felt light-headed and
wonderfully happy and carefree.

"I have been doing something," he thought; "I wonder what it is."

The house faced a grove of pine trees and was reached by climbing a little
rise and following a winding road out beyond the graveyard and the last of
the village lights. The wild spring rain pounded and rattled on the tin
roof overhead, and Sam, his back closely pressed against the front of the
house, fought to regain control of his mind.

For an hour he stood there staring into the darkness and watched with
delight the progress of the storm. He had--an inheritance from his mother
--a love of thunderstorms. He remembered a night when he was a boy and his
mother had got out of bed and gone here and there through the house
singing. She had sung softly so that the sleeping father did not hear, and
in his bed upstairs Sam had lain awake listening to the noises--the rain
on the roof, the occasional crash of thunder, the snoring of Windy, and
the unusual and, he thought, beautiful sound of the mother singing in the
storm.

Now, lifting up his head, he looked about with delight. Trees in the grove
in front of him bent and tossed in the wind. The inky blackness of the
night was relieved by the flickering oil lamp in the road beyond the
graveyard and, in the distance, by the lights streaming out at the windows
of the houses. The light coming out of the house against which he stood
made a little cylinder of brightness among the pine trees through which
the raindrops fell gleaming and sparkling. An occasional flash of
lightning lit up the trees and the winding road, and the cannonry of the
skies rolled and echoed overhead. A kind of wild song sang in Sam's heart.

"I wish it would last all night," he thought, his mind fixed on the
singing of his mother in the dark house when he was a boy.

The door opened and a woman stepped out upon the veranda and stood before
him facing the storm, the wind tossing the soft kimono in which she was
clad and the rain wetting her face. Under the tin roof, the air was filled
with the rattling reverberation of the rain. The woman lifted her head
and, with the rain beating down upon her, began singing, her fine
contralto voice rising above the rattle of the rain on the roof and going
on uninterrupted by the crash of the thunder. She sang of a lover riding
through the storm to his mistress. One refrain persisted in the song--

  "He rode and he thought of her red, red lips,"

sang the woman, putting her hand upon the railing of the little porch and
leaning forward into the storm.

Sam was amazed. The woman standing before him was Mary Underwood, who had
been his friend when he was a boy in school and toward whom his mind had
turned after the tragedy in the kitchen. The figure of the woman standing
singing before him became a part of his thoughts of his mother singing on
the stormy night in the house and his mind wandered on, seeing pictures as
he used to see them when a boy walking under the stars and listening to
the talk of John Telfer. He saw a broad-shouldered man shouting defiance
to the storm as he rode down a mountain path.

"And he laughed at the rain on his wet, wet cloak," went on the voice of
the singer.

Mary Underwood's singing there in the rain made her seem near and likeable
as she had seemed to him when he was a barefoot boy.

"John Telfer was wrong about her," he thought.

She turned and faced him. Tiny streams of water ran from her hair down
across her cheeks. A flash of lightning cut the darkness, illuminating the
spot where Sam, now a broad-shouldered man, stood with the mud upon his
clothes and the bewildered look upon his face. A sharp exclamation of
surprise broke from her lips:

"Hello, Sam! What are you doing here? You had better get in out of the
rain."

"I like it here," replied Sam, lifting his head and looking past her at
the storm.

Walking to the door and standing with her hand upon the knob, Mary looked
into the darkness.

"You have been a long time coming to see me," she said, "come in."

Within the house, with the door closed, the rattle of the rain on the
veranda roof sank to a subdued, quiet drumming. Piles of books lay upon a
table in the centre of the room and there were other books on the shelves
along the walls. On a table burned a student's lamp and in the corners of
the room lay heavy shadows.

Sam stood by the wall near the door looking about with half-seeing eyes.

Mary, who had gone to another part of the house and who now returned clad
in a long cloak, looked at him with quick curiosity, and began moving
about the room picking up odds and ends of woman's clothing scattered on
the chairs. Kneeling, she lighted a fire under some sticks piled in an
open grate at the side of the room.

"It was the storm made me want to sing," she said self-consciously, and
then briskly, "we shall have to be drying you out; you have fallen in the
road and got yourself covered with mud."

From being morose and silent Sam became talkative. An idea had come into
his mind.

"I have come here courting," he thought; "I have come to ask Mary
Underwood to be my wife and live in my house."

The woman, kneeling by the blazing sticks, made a picture that aroused
something that had been sleeping in him. The heavy cloak she wore, falling
away, showed the round little shoulders imperfectly covered by the kimono,
wet and clinging to them. The slender, youthful figure, the soft grey hair
and the serious little face, lit by the burning sticks caused a jumping of
his heart.

"We are needing a woman in our house," he said heavily, repeating the
words that had been on his lips as he stumbled through the storm-swept
streets and along the mud-covered roads. "We are needing a woman in our
house, and I have come to take you there.

"I intend to marry you," he added, lurching across the room and grasping
her roughly by the shoulders. "Why not? I am needing a woman."

Mary Underwood was dismayed and frightened by the face looking down at
her, and by the strong hands clenched upon her shoulders. In his youth she
had conceived a kind of maternal passion for the newsboy and had planned a
future for him. Her plans if followed would have made him a scholar, a man
living his life among books and ideas. Instead, he had chosen to live his
life among men, to be a money-maker, to drive about the country like
Freedom Smith, making deals with farmers. She had seen him driving at
evening through the street to Freedom's house, going in and out of
Wildman's, and walking through the streets with men. In a dim way she knew
that an influence had been at work upon him to win him from the things of
which she had dreamed and she had secretly blamed John Telfer, the
talking, laughing idler. Now, out of the storm, the boy had come back to
her, his hands and his clothes covered with the mud of the road, and
talked to her, a woman old enough to be his mother, of marriage and of
coming to live with him in his house. She stood, chilled, looking into the
eager, strong face and the eyes with the pained, dazed look in them.

Under her gaze, something of the old feeling of the boy came back to Sam,
and he began vaguely trying to tell her of it.

"It was not the talk of Telfer drove me from you," he began, "it was
because you talked so much of the schools and of books. I was tired of
them. I could not go on year after year sitting in a stuffy little
schoolroom when there was so much money to be made in the world. I grew
tired of the school teachers, drumming with their fingers on the desks and
looking out at the windows at men passing in the street. I wanted to get
out of there and into the streets myself."

Dropping his hands from her shoulders, he sat down in a chair and stared
into the fire, now blazing steadily. Steam began to rise from his trousers
legs. His mind, still working beyond his control, began to reconstruct an
old boyhood fancy, half his own, half John Telfer's, that had years before
come into his mind. It concerned a picture he and Telfer had made of the
ideal scholar. The picture had, as its central figure, a stoop-shouldered,
feeble old man stumbling along the street, muttering to himself and poking
in a gutter with a stick. The picture was a caricature of puttering old
Frank Huntley, superintendent of the Caxton schools.

Sitting before the fire in Mary Underwood's house, become, for the moment,
a boy, facing a boy's problems, Sam did not want to be such a man. He
wanted only that in scholarship which would help him to be the kind of man
he was bent on being, a man of the world doing the work of the world and
making money by his work. Things he had been unable to get expressed when
he was a boy and her friend, coming again into his mind, he felt that he
must here and now make it plain to Mary Underwood that the schools were
not giving him what he wanted. His brain worked on the problem of how to
tell her about it.

Turning, he looked at her and said earnestly: "I am going to quit the
schools. It is not your fault, but I am going to quit just the same."

Mary, who had been looking down at the great mud-covered figure in the
chair began to understand. A light came into her eyes. Going to the door
opening into a stairway leading to sleeping rooms above, she called
sharply, "Auntie, come down here at once. There is a sick man here."

A startled, trembling voice answered from above, "Who is it?"

Mary Underwood did not answer. She came back to Sam and, putting her hand
gently on his shoulder, said, "It is your mother and you are only a sick,
half-crazed boy after all. Is she dead? Tell me about it."

Sam shook his head. "She is still there in the bed, coughing." He roused
himself and stood up. "I have just killed my father," he announced. "I
choked him and threw him down the bank into the road in front of the
house. He made horrible noises in the kitchen and mother was tired and
wanted to sleep."

Mary Underwood began running about the room. From a little alcove under a
stairway she took clothes, throwing them upon the floor about the room.
She pulled on a stocking and, unconscious of Sam's presence, raised her
skirts and fastened it. Then, putting one shoe on the stockinged foot and
the other on the bare one, she turned to him. "We will go back to your
house. I think you are right. You need a woman there."

In the street she walked rapidly along, clinging to the arm of the tall
fellow who strode silently beside her. A cheerfulness had come over Sam.
He felt he had accomplished something--something he had set out to
accomplish. He again thought of his mother and drifting into the notion
that he was on his way home from work at Freedom Smith's, began planning
the evening he would spend with her.

"I will tell her of the letter from the Chicago company and of what I will
do when I go to the city," he thought.

At the gate before the McPherson house Mary looked into the road below the
grassy bank that ran down from the fence, but in the darkness she could
see nothing. The rain continued to fall and the wind screamed and shouted
as it rushed through the bare branches of the trees. Sam went through the
gate and around the house to the kitchen door intent upon getting to his
mother's bedside.

In the house the neighbour woman sat asleep in a chair before the kitchen
stove. The daughter had gone.

Sam went through the house to the parlour and sat down in a chair beside
his mother's bed, picking up her hand and holding it in his own. "She must
be asleep," he thought.

At the kitchen door Mary Underwood stopped, and, turning, ran away into
the darkness along the street. By the kitchen fire the neighbour woman
still slept. In the parlour Sam, sitting on the chair beside his mother's
bed, looked about him. A lamp burned dimly upon the little stand beside
the bed and the light of it fell upon the portrait of a tall,
aristocratic-looking woman with rings on her fingers, that hung upon the
wall. The picture belonged to Windy and was claimed by him as a portrait
of his mother, and it had once brought on a quarrel between Sam and his
sister.

Kate had taken the portrait of the lady seriously, and the boy had come
upon her sitting in a chair before it, her hair rearranged and her hands
lying in her lap in imitation of the pose maintained so haughtily by the
great lady who looked down at her.

"It is a fraud," he had declared, irritated by what he believed his
sister's devotion to one of the father's pretensions. "It is a fraud he
has picked up somewhere and now claims as his mother to make people
believe he is something big."

The girl, ashamed at having been caught in the pose, and furious because
of the attack upon the authenticity of the portrait, had gone into a spasm
of indignation, putting her hands to her ears and stamping on the floor
with her foot. Then she had run across the room and dropped upon her knees
before a little couch, buried her face in a pillow and shook with anger
and grief.

Sam had turned and walked out of the room. The emotions of the sister had
seemed to him to have the flavour of one of Windy's outbreaks.

"She likes it," he had thought, dismissing the incident. "She likes
believing in lies. She is like Windy and would rather believe in them than
not."

       *       *       *       *       *

Mary Underwood ran through the rain to John Telfer's house and beat on the
door with her fist until Telfer, followed by Eleanor, holding a lamp above
her head, appeared at the door. With Telfer she went back through the
streets to the front of Sam's house thinking of the terrible choked and
disfigured man they should find there. She went along clinging to Telfer's
arm as she had clung to Sam's, unconscious of her bare head and scanty
attire. In his hand Telfer carried a lantern secured from the stable.

In the road before the house they found nothing. Telfer went up and down
swinging the lantern and peering into gutters. The woman walked beside
him, her skirts lifted and the mud splashing upon her bare leg.

Suddenly Telfer threw back his head and laughed. Taking her hand he led
Mary with a rush up the bank and through the gate.

"What a muddle-headed old fool I am!" he cried. "I am getting old and
addle-pated! Windy McPherson is not dead! Nothing could kill that old war
horse! He was in at Wildman's grocery after nine o'clock to-night covered
with mud and swearing he had been in a fight with Art Sherman. Poor Sam
and you--to have come to me and to have found me a stupid ass! Fool! Fool!
What a fool I have become!"

In at the kitchen door ran Mary and Telfer, frightening the woman by the
stove so that she sprang to her feet and began nervously making the false
teeth rattle with her tongue. In the parlour they found Sam, his head upon
the edge of the bed, asleep. In his hand he held the cold hand of Jane
McPherson. She had been dead for an hour. Mary Underwood stooped over and
kissed his wet hair as the neighbour woman came in at the doorway bearing
the kitchen lamp, and John Telfer, holding his finger to his lips,
commanded silence.




CHAPTER VIII


The funeral of Jane McPherson was a trying affair for her son. He thought
that his sister Kate, with the babe in her arms, had become coarsened--she
looked frumpish and, while they were in the house, had an air of having
quarrelled with her husband when they came out of their bedroom in the
morning. During the funeral service Sam sat in the parlour, astonished and
irritated by the endless number of women that crowded into the house. They
were everywhere, in the kitchen, the sleeping room back of the parlour;
and in the parlour, where the dead woman lay in her coffin, they were
massed. When the thin-lipped minister, holding a book in his hand, held
forth upon the virtues of the dead woman, they wept. Sam looked at the
floor and thought that thus they would have wept over the body of the dead
Windy, had his fingers but tightened a trifle. He wondered if the minister
would have talked in the same way--blatantly and without knowledge--of the
virtues of the dead. In a chair at the side of the coffin the bereaved
husband, in new black clothes, wept audibly. The baldheaded, officious
undertaker kept moving nervously about, intent upon the ritual of his
trade.

During the service, a man sitting behind him dropped a note on the floor
at Sam's feet. Sam picked it up and read it, glad of something to distract
his attention from the voice of the minister, and the faces of the weeping
women, none of whom had before been in the house and all of whom he
thought strikingly lacking in a sense of the sacredness of privacy. The
note was from John Telfer.

"I will not come to your mother's funeral," he wrote. "I respected your
mother while she lived and I will leave you alone with her now that she is
dead. In her memory I will hold a ceremony in my heart. If I am in
Wildman's, I may ask the man to quit selling soap and tobacco for the
moment and to close and lock the door. If I am at Valmore's shop, I will
go up into his loft and listen to him pounding on the anvil below. If he
or Freedom Smith go to your house, I warn them I will cut their
friendship. When I see the carriages going through the street and know
that the thing is right well done and over, I will buy flowers and take
them to Mary Underwood as an appreciation of the living in the name of the
dead."

The note cheered and comforted Sam. It gave him back a grip of something
that had slipped from him.

"It is good sense, after all," he thought, and realised that even in the
days when he was being made to suffer horrors, and in the face of the fact
that Jane McPherson's long, hard role was just being played out to the
end, the farmer in the field was sowing his corn, Valmore was beating upon
his anvil, and John Telfer was writing notes with a flourish. He arose,
interrupting the minister's discourse. Mary Underwood had come in just as
the minister began talking and had dropped into an obscure corner near the
door leading into the street. Sam crowded past the women who stared and
the minister who frowned and the baldheaded undertaker who wrung his hands
and, dropping the note into her lap, said, oblivious of the people looking
and listening with breathless curiosity, "It is from John Telfer. Read it.
Even he, hating women as he did, is now bringing flowers to your door."

In the room a wind of whispered comments sprang up. Women, putting their
heads together and their hands before their faces, nodded toward the
school teacher, and the boy, unconscious of the sensation he had created,
went back to his chair and looked again at the floor, waiting until the
talk and the singing of songs and the parading through the streets should
be ended. Again the minister began reading from the book.

"I have become older than all of these people here," thought the youth.
"They play at life and death, and I have felt it between the fingers of my
hand."

Mary Underwood, lacking Sam's unconsciousness of the people, looked about
with burning cheeks. Seeing the women whispering and putting their heads
together, a chill of fear ran through her. Into the room had been thrust
the face of an old enemy to her--the scandal of a small town. Picking up
the note she slipped out at the door and stole away along the street. The
old maternal love for Sam had returned strengthened and ennobled by the
terror through which she had passed with him that night in the rain. Going
to her house she whistled the collie dog and set out along a country road.
At the edge of a grove of trees she stopped, sat down on a log, and read
Telfer's note. From the soft ground into which her feet sank there came
the warm pungent smell of the new growth. Tears came into her eyes. She
thought that in a few days much had come to her. She had got a boy upon
whom she could pour out the mother love in her heart, and she had made a
friend of Telfer, whom she had long regarded with fear and doubt.

For a month Sam lingered in Caxton. It seemed to him there was something
that wanted doing there. He sat with the men at the back of Wildman's, and
walked aimlessly through the streets and out of the town along the country
roads, where men worked all day in the fields behind sweating horses,
ploughing the land. The thrill of spring was in the air, and in the
evening a song sparrow sang in the apple tree below his bedroom window.
Sam walked and loitered in silence, looking at the ground. In his mind was
the dread of people. The talk of the men in the store wearied him and when
he went alone into the country he found himself accompanied by the voices
of all of those he had come out of town to escape. On the street corner
the thin-lipped, brown-bearded minister stopped him and talked of the
future life as he had stopped and talked to a bare-legged newsboy.

"Your mother," he said, "has but gone before. It is for you to get into
the narrow path and follow her. God has sent this sorrow as a warning to
you. He wants you also to get into the way of life and in the end to join
her. Begin coming to our church. Join in the work of the Christ. Find
truth."

Sam, who had listened without hearing, shook his head and went on. The
minister's talk seemed no more than a meaningless jumble of words out of
which he got but one thought.

"Find truth," he repeated to himself after the minister, and let his mind
play with the idea. "The best men are all trying to do that. They spend
their lives at the task. They are all trying to find truth."

He went along the street, pleased with himself because of the
interpretation he had put upon the minister's words. The terrible moments
in the kitchen followed by his mother's death had put a new look of
seriousness into his face and he felt within him a new sense of
responsibility to the dead woman and to himself. Men stopped him on the
street and wished him well in the city. News of his leaving had become
public. Things in which Freedom Smith was concerned were always public
affairs.

"He would take a drum with him to make love to a neighbour's wife," said
John Telfer.

Sam felt that in a way he was a child of Caxton. Early it had taken him to
its bosom; it had made of him a semi-public character; it had encouraged
him in his money-making, humiliated him through his father, and patronised
him lovingly because of his toiling mother. When he was a boy, scurrying
between the legs of the drunkards in Piety Hollow of a Saturday night,
there was always some one to speak a word to him of his morals and to
shout at him a cheering word of advice. Had he elected to remain there,
with the thirty-five hundred dollars already in the Savings Bank--built to
that during his years with Freedom Smith--he might soon become one of the
town's solid men.

He did not want to stay. He felt that his call was in another place and
that he would go there gladly. He wondered why he did not get on the train
and be off.

One night when he had been late on the road, loitering by fences, hearing
the lonely barking of dogs at distant farmhouses, getting the smell of the
new-ploughed ground into his nostrils, he came into town and sat down on a
low iron fence that ran along by the platform of the railroad station, to
wait for the midnight train north. Trains had taken on a new meaning to
him since any day might see him on such a train bound into his new life.

A man, with two bags in his hands, came on the station platform followed
by two women.

"Here, watch these," he said to the women, setting the bags upon the
platform; "I will go for the tickets," and disappeared into the darkness.

The two women resumed their interrupted talk.

"Ed's wife has been poorly these ten years," said one of them. "It will be
better for her and for Ed now that she is dead, but I dread the long ride.
I wish she had died when I was in Ohio two years ago. I am sure to be
train-sick."

Sam, sitting in the darkness, was thinking of a part of one of John
Telfer's old talks with him.

"They are good people but they are not your people. You will go away from
here. You will be a big man of dollars, it is plain."

He began listening idly to the two women. The man had a shop for mending
shoes on a side street back of Geiger's drug store and the two women, one
short and round, one long and thin, kept a small, dingy millinery shop and
were Eleanor Telfer's only competitors.

"Well, the town knows her now for what she is," said the tall woman.
"Milly Peters says she won't rest until she has put that stuck-up Mary
Underwood in her place. Her mother worked in the McPherson house and it
was her told Milly. I never heard such a story. To think of Jane McPherson
working all these years and then having such goings-on in her house when
she lay dying, Milly says that Sam went away early in the evening and came
home late with that Underwood thing, half dressed, hanging on his arm.
Milly's mother looked out of the window and saw them. Then she ran out by
the kitchen stove and pretended to be asleep. She wanted to see what was
up. And the bold hussy came right into the house with Sam. Then she went
away, and after a while back she came with that John Telfer. Milly is
going to see that Eleanor Telfer finds it out. I guess it will bring her
down, too. And there is no telling how many other men in this town Mary
Underwood is running with. Milly says----"

The two women turned as out of the darkness came a tall figure roaring and
swearing. Two hands flashed out and sank into their hair.

"Stop it!" growled Sam, beating the two heads together, "stop your dirty
lies!--you ugly she-beasts!"

Hearing the two women screaming the man who had gone for the railroad
tickets came running down the station platform followed by Jerry Donlin.
Springing forward Sam knocked the shoemaker over the iron fence into a
newly spaded flower bed and then turned to the baggage man.

"They were telling lies about Mary Underwood," he shouted. "She tried to
save me from killing my father and now they are telling lies about her."

The two women picked up the bags and ran whimpering away along the station
platform. Jerry Donlin climbed over the iron fence and confronted the
surprised and frightened shoemaker.

"What the Hell are you doing in my flower bed?" he growled.

       *       *       *       *       *

Hurrying through the streets Sam's mind was in a ferment. Like the Roman
emperor he wished that all the world had but one head that he might cut it
off with a slash. The town that had seemed so paternal, so cheery, so
intent upon wishing him well, now seemed horrible. He thought of it as a
great, crawling, slimy thing lying in wait amid the cornfields.

"To be saying that of her, of that white soul!" he exclaimed aloud in the
empty street, all of his boyish loyalty and devotion to the woman who had
put out a hand to him in his hour of trouble aroused and burning in him.

He wished that he might meet another man and could hit him also a swinging
blow on the nose as he had hit the amazed shoemaker. He went to his own
house and, leaning on the gate, stood looking at it and swearing
meaninglessly. Then, turning, he went again through the deserted streets
past the railroad station where, the midnight train having come and gone
and Jerry Donlin having gone home for the night, all was dark and quiet.
He was filled with horror of what Mary Underwood had seen at Jane
McPherson's funeral.

"It is better to be utterly bad than to speak ill of another," he thought.

For the first time he realised another side of village life. In fancy he
saw going past him on the dark road a long file of women, women with
coarse unlighted faces and dead eyes. Many of the faces he knew. They were
the faces of Caxton wives at whose houses he had delivered papers. He
remembered how eagerly they had run out of their houses to get the papers
and how they hung day after day over the details of sensational murder
cases. Once, when a Chicago girl had been murdered in a dive and the
details were unusually revolting, two women, unable to restrain their
curiosity, had come to the station to wait for the train bringing the
newspapers and Sam had heard them rolling the horrid mess over and over on
their tongues.

In every city and in every village there is a class of women, the thought
of whom paralyses the mind. They live their lives in small, unaired,
unsanitary houses, and go on year after year washing dishes and clothes--
only their fingers occupied. They read no good books, think no clean
thoughts, are made love to as John Telfer had said, with kisses in a
darkened room by a shame-faced yokel and, after marrying some such a
yokel, live lives of unspeakable blankness. Into the houses of these women
come the husbands at evening, tired and uncommunicative, to eat hurriedly
and then go again into the streets or, the blessing of utter physical
exhaustion having come to them, to sit for an hour in stockinged feet
before crawling away to sleep and oblivion.

In these women is no light, no vision. They have instead certain fixed
ideas to which they cling with a persistency touching heroism. To the man
they have snatched from society they cling also with a tenacity to be
measured only by their love of a roof over their heads and the craving for
food to put into their stomachs. Being mothers, they are the despair of
reformers, the shadow on the vision of dreamers and they put the black
dread upon the heart of the poet who cries, "The female of the species is
more deadly than the male." At their worst they are to be seen drunk with
emotion amid the lurid horrors of a French Revolution or immersed in the
secret whispering, creeping terror of a religious persecution. At their
best they are mothers of half mankind. Wealth coming to them, they throw
themselves into garish display of it and flash upon the sight of Newport
or Palm Beach. In their native lair in the close little houses, they sleep
in the bed of the man who has put clothes upon their backs and food into
their mouths because that is the usage of their kind and give him of their
bodies grudgingly or willingly as the laws of their physical needs direct.
They do not love, they sell, instead, their bodies in the market place and
cry out that man shall witness their virtue because they had had the joy
of finding one buyer instead of the many of the red sisterhood. A fierce
animalism in them makes them cling to the babe at their breast and in the
days of its softness and loveliness they close their eyes and try to catch
again an old fleeting dream of their girlhood, a something vague, shadowy,
no longer a part of them, brought with the babe out of the infinite.
Having passed beyond the land of dreams, they dwell in the land of
emotions and weep over the bodies of unknown dead or sit under the
eloquence of evangelists, shouting of heaven and of hell--the call to the
one being brother to the call of the other--crying upon the troubled air
of hot little churches, where hope is fighting in the jaws of vulgarity,
"The weight of my sins is heavy on my soul." Along streets they go lifting
heavy eyes to peer into the lives of others and to get a morsel to roll
upon their heavy tongues. Having fallen upon a side light in the life of a
Mary Underwood they return to it again and again as a dog to its offal.
Something touching the lives of such as walk in the clean air, dream
dreams, and have the audacity to be beautiful beyond the beauty of animal
youth, maddens them, and they cry out, running from kitchen door to
kitchen door and tearing at the prize like a starved beast who has found a
carcass. Let but earnest women found a movement and crowd it forward to
the day when it smacks of success and gives promise of the fine emotion of
achievement, and they fall upon it with a cry, having hysteria rather than
reason as their guiding impulse. In them is all of femininity--and none of
it. For the most part they live and die unseen, unknown, eating rank food,
sleeping overmuch, and sitting through summer afternoons rocking in chairs
and looking at people passing in the street. In the end they die full of
faith, hoping for a life to come.

Sam stood upon the road fearing the attacks these women were now making on
Mary Underwood. The moon coming up, threw its light on the fields that lay
beside the road and brought out their early spring nakedness and he
thought them dreary and hideous, like the faces of the women that had been
marching through his mind. He drew his overcoat about him and shivered as
he went on, the mud splashing him and the raw night air aggravating the
dreariness of his thoughts. He tried to revert to the assurance of the
days before his mother's illness and to get again the strong belief in his
own destiny that had kept him at the money making and saving and had urged
him to the efforts to rise above the level of the man who bred him. He
didn't succeed. The feeling of age that had settled upon him in the midst
of the people mourning over the body of his mother came back, and,
turning, he went along the road toward the town, saying to himself: "I
will go and talk to Mary Underwood."

While he waited on the veranda for Mary to open the door, he decided that
after all a marriage with her might lead to happiness. The half spiritual,
half physical love of woman that is the glory and mystery of youth was
gone from him. He thought that if he could only drive from her presence
the fear of the faces that had been coming and going in his own mind he
would, for his own part, be content to live his life as a worker and money
maker, one without dreams.

Mary Underwood came to the door wearing the same heavy long coat she had
worn on that other night and taking her by the hand Sam led her to the
edge of the veranda. He looked with content at the pine trees before the
house, thinking that some benign influence must have guided the hand that
planted them there to stand clothed and decent amid the barrenness of the
land at the end of winter.

"What is it, boy?" asked the woman, and her voice was filled with anxiety.
The maternal passion again glowing in her had for days coloured all her
thoughts, and with all the ardour of an intense nature she had thrown
herself into her love of Sam. Thinking of him, she felt in fancy the pangs
of birth, and in her bed at night relived with him his boyhood in the town
and built again her plans for his future. In the day time she laughed at
herself and said tenderly, "You are an old fool."

Brutally and frankly Sam told her of the thing he had heard on the station
platform, looking past her at the pine trees and gripping the veranda
rail. From the dead land there came again the smell of the new growth as
it had come to him on the road before the revelation at the railroad
station.

"Something kept telling me not to go away," he said. "It must have been in
the air--this thing. Already these evil crawling things were at work. Oh,
if only all the world, like you and Telfer and some of the others here,
had an appreciation of the sense of privacy."

Mary Underwood laughed quietly.

"I was more than half right when, in the old days, I dreamed of making you
a man at work upon the things of the mind," she said. "The sense of
privacy indeed! What a fellow you have become! John Telfer's method was
better than my own. He has given you the knack of saying things with a
flourish."

Sam shook his head.

"Here is something that cannot be faced down with a laugh," he said
stoutly. "Here is something at you--it is tearing at you--it has got to be
met. Even now women are waking up in bed and turning the matter over in
their minds. To-morrow they will be at you again. There is but one way and
we must take it. You and I will have to marry."

Mary looked at the serious new lines of his face.

"What a proposal!" she cried.

On an impulse she began singing, her voice fine and strong running through
the quiet night.

  "He rode and he thought of her red, red lips,"

she sang, and laughed again.

"You should come like that," she said, and then, "you poor muddled boy.
Don't you know that I am your new mother?" she added, taking hold of his
two arms and turning him about facing her. "Don't be absurd. I don't want
a husband or a lover. I want a son of my own and I have found him. I
adopted you here in this house that night when you came to me sick and
covered with mud. As for these women--away with them--I'll face them down
--I did it once before and I'll do it again. Go to your city and make your
fight. Here in Caxton it is a woman's fight."

"It is horrible. You don't understand," Sam protested.

A grey, tired look came into Mary Underwood's face.

"I understand," she said. "I have been on that battlefield. It is to be
won only by silence and tireless waiting. Your very effort to help would
make the matter worse."

The woman and the tall boy, suddenly become a man, stood in thought. She
was thinking of the end toward which her life was drifting. How
differently she had planned it. She thought of the college in
Massachusetts and of the men and women walking under the elm trees there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




BOOK II


CHAPTER I


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He began laughing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER II


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What collateral?" he asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER III


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER IV


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sam shook his head.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sam lighted a cigar.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Luella London put the roll of bills into her purse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You grafter!" she sneered.

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

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

Luella reached for her purse.

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

Sam laughed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Do you get your half?" she asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sam walked around the desk and took her hand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER V


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She laughed and shook her head.

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

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

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

He turned and faced her again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The best men spend their lives seeking truth."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sam said nothing and she went on.

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

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

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

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

She shook her head.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A stern look came into Sam's eyes.

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

She sprang to her feet and stood before him.

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

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

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

"And what do you want?"

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

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

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

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

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

A line of Tennyson's came into his mind.

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

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

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

He walked up and down the room.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER IX


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




BOOK III


CHAPTER I


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Their son," he whispered cautiously.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He nodded his head up and down and smiled knowingly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sam told him a half-truth.

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

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

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

The red-haired man called Jake began talking.

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

Sam lay back upon the grass.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"How would you do that?" asked Jake.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jake folded the paper and put it in his pocket.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jake rolled the quid in his mouth and winked again.

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

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

Jake threw out his hand impatiently.

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

Sam walked over and held open the door.

"Good night," he said.

Jake looked annoyed.

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

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

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




CHAPTER II


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joe looked indignant.

"A man wants independence," he said.

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




CHAPTER III


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Bar flies," the proprietor explained laconically.

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER IV


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

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

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

"On the road, brother?" he asked.

Sam shook his head, and the other began talking.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sam's mind began working on the problem.

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

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

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

Turning to the Jewish girl he made a quick decision.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Jewish girl looked at Sam and laughed bitterly.

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

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

A shadow fell across the girl's face.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I will pay," he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frank rose at the back of the room.

"Who are you anyway?" he asked.

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

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

The Jewish girl sprang to her feet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sam shook his head.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sam laughed and picking up his pen began writing.

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

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

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

"You're a wonder," he said.

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

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

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

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

At ten o'clock Frank returned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The soft-eyed Jewish girl sprang to her feet.

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

Harrigan walked toward her threateningly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Will you use it?" asked Frank.

The Skipper laughed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER V


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

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

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

She looked startled and then laughed.

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

"Why?" asked Sam.

She laughed again and stepping over looked at him closely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sam said nothing.

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

Sam kept on walking.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She stopped talking and leaning over put her cheek down on her hand and
sat looking into the fire.

"My mother," she began again, "didn't always wear a clean dress. She
couldn't. She was always down on her knees scrubbing around the floor or
out in the garden pulling weeds. But she hated dirt. If her dress was
dirty her underwear was clean and so was her body. She taught me to be
that way and I wanted to be. It came naturally. But I'm losing it all. All
evening I have been sitting here with you thinking that my underwear isn't
clean. Most of the time I don't care. Being clean doesn't go with what I
am doing. I have to keep trying to be flashy outside so that men will stop
when they see me on the street. Sometimes when I have done well I don't go
on the streets for three or four weeks. Then I clean up my room and bathe
myself. My landlady lets me do my washing in the basement at night. I
don't seem to care about cleanliness the weeks I am on the streets."

The little German orchestra began playing a lullaby, and a fat German
waiter came in at the open door and put more wood on the fire. He stopped
by the table and talked about the mud in the road outside. From another
room came the silvery clink of glasses and the sound of laughing voices.
The girl and Sam drifted back into talk of their home towns. Sam felt that
he liked her very much and thought that if she had belonged to him he
should have found a basis on which to live with her contentedly. She had a
quality of honesty that he was always seeking in people.

As they drove back to the city she put a hand on his arm.

"I wouldn't mind about you," she said, looking at him frankly.

Sam laughed and patted her thin hand. "It's been a good evening," he said,
"we'll go through with it as it stands."

"Thanks for that," she said, "and there is something else I want to tell
you. Perhaps you will think it bad of me. Sometimes when I don't want to
go on the streets I get down on my knees and pray for strength to go on
gamely. Does it seem bad? We are a praying people, we New Englanders."

As he stood in the street Sam could hear her laboured asthmatic breathing
as she climbed the stairs to her room. Half way up she stopped and waved
her hand at him. The thing was awkwardly done and boyish. Sam had a
feeling that he should like to get a gun and begin shooting citizens in
the streets. He stood in the lighted city looking down the long deserted
street and thought of Mike McCarthy in the jail at Caxton. Like Mike, he
lifted up his voice in the night.

"Are you there, O God? Have you left your children here on the earth
hurting each other? Do you put the seed of a million children in a man,
and the planting of a forest in one tree, and permit men to wreck and hurt
and destroy?"




CHAPTER VI


One morning, at the end of his second year of wandering, Sam got out of
his bed in a cold little hotel in a mining village in West Virginia,
looked at the miners, their lamps in their caps, going through the dimly
lighted streets, ate a portion of leathery breakfast cakes, paid his bill
at the hotel, and took a train for New York. He had definitely abandoned
the idea of getting at what he wanted through wandering about the country
and talking to chance acquaintances by the wayside and in villages, and
had decided to return to a way of life more befitting his income.

He felt that he was not by nature a vagabond, and that the call of the
wind and the sun and the brown road was not insistent in his blood. The
spirit of Pan did not command him, and although there were certain spring
mornings of his wandering days that were like mountain tops in his
experience of life, mornings when some strong, sweet feeling ran through
the trees, and the grass, and the body of the wanderer, and when the call
of life seemed to come shouting and inviting down the wind, filling him
with delight of the blood in his body and the thoughts in his brain, yet
at bottom and in spite of these days of pure joy he was, after all, a man
of the towns and the crowds. Caxton and South Water Street and LaSalle
Street had all left their marks on him, and so, throwing his canvas jacket
into a corner of the room in the West Virginia hotel, he returned to the
haunts of his kind.

In New York he went to an uptown club where he owned a membership and into
the grill where he found at breakfast an actor acquaintance named Jackson.

Sam dropped into a chair and looked about him. He remembered a visit he
had made there some years before with Webster and Crofts and felt again
the quiet elegance of the surroundings.

"Hello, Moneymaker," said Jackson, heartily. "Heard you had gone to a
nunnery."

Sam laughed and began ordering a breakfast that made Jackson's eyes open
with astonishment.

"You, Mr. Elegance, would not understand a man's spending month after
month in the open air seeking a good body and an end in life and then
suddenly changing his mind and coming back to a place like this," he
observed.

Jackson laughed and lighted a cigarette.

"How little you know me," he said. "I would live my life in the open but
that I am a mighty good actor and have just finished another long New York
run. What are you going to do now that you are thin and brown? Will you go
back to Morrison and Prince and money making?"

Sam shook his head and looked at the quiet elegance of the man before him.
How satisfied and happy he looked.

"I am going to try living among the rich and the leisurely," he said.

"They are a rotten crew," Jackson assured him, "and I am taking a night
train for Detroit. Come with me. We will talk things over."

On the train that night they got into talk with a broad-shouldered old man
who told them of a hunting trip on which he was bound.

"I am going to sail from Seattle," he said, "and go everywhere and hunt
everything. I am going to shoot the head off of every big animal kind of
thing left in the world and then come back to New York and stay there
until I die."

"I will go with you," said Sam, and in the morning left Jackson at Detroit
and continued westward with his new acquaintance.

For months Sam travelled and shot with the old man, a vigorous, big-
hearted old fellow who, having become wealthy through an early investment
in stock of the Standard Oil Company, devoted his life to his lusty,
primitive passion for shooting and killing. They went on lion hunts,
elephant hunts and tiger hunts, and when on the west coast of Africa Sam
took a boat for London, his companion walked up and down the beach smoking
black cheroots and declaring the fun was only half over and that Sam was a
fool to go.

After the year of the hunt royal Sam spent another year living the life of
a gentleman of wealth and leisure in London, New York, and Paris. He went
on automobile trips, fished and loafed along the shores of northern lakes,
canoed through Canada with a writer of nature books, and sat about clubs
and fashionable hotels listening to the talk of the men and women of that
world.

Late one afternoon in the spring of the year he went to the village on the
Hudson River where Sue had taken a house, and almost immediately saw her.
For an hour he followed, watching her quick, active little figure as she
walked through the village streets, and wondering what life had come to
mean to her, but when, turning suddenly, she would have come face to face
with him, he hurried down a side street and took a train to the city
feeling that he could not face her empty-handed and ashamed after the
years.

In the end he started drinking again, not moderately now, but steadily and
almost continuously. One night in Detroit, with three young men from his
hotel, he got drunk and was, for the first time since his parting with
Sue, in the company of women. Four of them, met in some restaurant, got
into an automobile with Sam and the three young men and rode about town
laughing, waving bottles of wine in the air, and calling to passers-by in
the street. They wound up in a diningroom in a place at the edge of town,
where the party spent hours around a long table, drinking, and singing
songs.

One of the girls sat on Sam's lap and put an arm about his neck.

"Give me some money, rich man," she said.

Sam looked at her closely.

"Who are you?" he asked.

She began explaining that she was a clerk in a downtown store and that she
had a lover who drove a laundry wagon.

"I go on these bats to get money to buy good clothes," she said frankly,
"but if Tim saw me here he would kill me."

Putting a bill into her hand Sam went downstairs and getting into a
taxicab drove back to his hotel.

After that night he went frequently on carouses of this kind. He was in a
kind of prolonged stupor of inaction, talked of trips abroad which he did
not take, bought a huge farm in Virginia which he never visited, planned a
return to business which he did not execute, and month after month
continued to waste his days. He would get out of bed at noon and begin
drinking steadily. As the afternoon passed he grew merry and talkative,
calling men by their first names, slapping chance acquaintances on the
back, playing pool or billiards with skilful young men intent upon gain.
In the early summer he got in with a party of young men from New York and
with them spent months in sheer idle waste of time. Together they drove
high-powered automobiles on long trips, drank, quarrelled, and went on
board a yacht to carouse, alone or with women. At times Sam would leave
his companions and spend days riding through the country on fast trains,
sitting for hours in silence looking out of the window at the passing
country and wondering at his endurance of the life he led. For some months
he carried with him a young man whom he called a secretary and paid a
large salary for his ability to tell stories and sing clever songs, only
to discharge him suddenly for telling a foul tale that reminded Sam of
another tale told by the stoop-shouldered old man in the office of Ed's
hotel in the Illinois town.

From being silent and taciturn, as during the months of his wanderings,
Sam became morose and combative. Staying on and on in the empty, aimless
way of life he had adopted he yet felt that there was for him a right way
of living and wondered at his continued inability to find it. He lost his
native energy, grew fat and coarse of body, was pleased for hours by
little things, read no books, lay for hours in bed drunk and talking
nonsense to himself, ran about the streets swearing vilely, grew
habitually coarse in thought and speech, sought constantly a lower and
more vulgar set of companions, was brutal and ugly with attendants about
hotels and clubs where he lived, hated life, but ran like a coward to
sanitariums and health resorts at the wagging of a doctor's head.




BOOK IV


CHAPTER I


One afternoon in early September Sam got on a westward-bound train
intending to visit his sister on the farm near Caxton. For years he had
heard nothing from Kate, but she had, he knew, two daughters, and he
thought he would do something for them.

"I will put them on the Virginia farm and make a will leaving them my
money," he thought. "Perhaps I shall be able to make them happy by setting
them up in life and giving them beautiful clothes to wear."

At St. Louis he got off the train, thinking vaguely that he would see an
attorney and make arrangements about the will, and for several days stayed
about the Planters Hotel with a set of drinking companions he had picked
up. One afternoon he began going from place to place drinking and
gathering companions. An ugly light was in his eyes and he looked at men
and women passing in the streets, feeling that he was in the midst of
enemies, and that for him the peace, contentment, and good cheer that
shone out of the eyes of others was beyond getting.

In the late afternoon, followed by a troop of roistering companions, he
came out upon a street flanked with small, brick warehouses facing the
river, where steamboats lay tied to floating docks.

"I want a boat to take me and my crowd for a cruise up and down the
river," he announced, approaching the captain of one of the boats. "Take
us up and down the river until we are tired of it. I will pay what it
costs."

It was one of the days when drink would not take hold of him, and he went
among his companions, buying drinks and thinking himself a fool to
continue furnishing entertainment for the vile crew that sat about him on
the deck of the boat. He began shouting and ordering them about.

"Sing louder," he commanded, tramping up and down and scowling at his
companions.

A young man of the party who had a reputation as a dancer refused to
perform when commanded. Springing forward Sam dragged him out on the deck
before the shouting crowd.

"Now dance!" he growled, "or I will throw you into the river."

The young man danced furiously, and Sam marched up and down and looked at
him and at the leering faces of the men and women lounging along the deck
or shouting at the dancer. The liquor in him beginning to take effect, a
queerly distorted version of his old passion for reproduction came to him
and he raised his hand for silence.

"I want to see a woman who is a mother," he shouted. "I want to see a
woman who has borne children."

A small woman with black hair and burning black eyes sprang from the group
gathered about the dancer.

"I have borne children--three of them," she said, laughing up into his
face. "I can bear more of them."

Sam looked at her stupidly and taking her by the arm led her to a chair on
the deck. The crowd laughed.

"Belle is after his roll," whispered a short, fat man to his companion, a
tall woman with blue eyes.

As the steamer, with its load of men and women drinking and singing songs,
went up the river past bluffs covered with trees, the woman beside Sam
pointed to a row of tiny houses at the top of the bluffs.

"My children are there. They are getting supper now," she said.

She began singing, laughing and waving a bottle to the others sitting
along the deck. A youth with heavy features stood upon a chair and sang a
song of the street, and, jumping to her feet, Sam's companion kept time
with the bottle in her hand. Sam walked over to where the captain stood
looking up the river.

"Turn back," he said, "I am tired of this crew."

On the way back down the river the black-eyed woman again sat beside Sam.

"We will go to my house," she said quietly, "just you and me. I will show
you the kids."

Darkness was gathering over the river as the boat turned, and in the
distance the lights of the city began blinking into view. The crowd had
grown quiet, sleeping in chairs along the deck or gathering in small
groups and talking in low tones. The black-haired woman began to tell Sam
her story.

She was, she said, the wife of a plumber who had left her.

"I drove him crazy," she said, laughing quietly. "He wanted me to stay at
home with him and the kids night after night. He used to follow me down
town at night begging me to come home. When I wouldn't come he would go
away with tears in his eyes. It made me furious. He wasn't a man. He would
do anything I asked him to do. And then he ran away and left the kids on
my hands."

In the city Sam, with the black-haired woman beside him, rode about in an
open carriage, forgetting the children and going from place to place,
eating and drinking. For an hour they sat in a box at the theatre, but
grew tired of the performance and climbed again into the carriage.

"We will go to my house. I want to have you alone," said the woman.

They drove through street after street of workingmen's houses, where
children ran laughing and playing under the lights, and two boys, their
bare legs flashing in the lights from the lamps overhead, ran after them,
holding to the back of the carriage.

The driver whipped the horses and looked back laughing. The woman got up
and kneeling on the seat of the carriage laughed down into the faces of
the running boys.

"Run, you little devils," she cried.

They held on, running furiously. Their legs twinkled and flashed under the
lights.

"Give me a silver dollar," she said, turning to Sam, and when he had given
it to her, threw it ringing upon the pavement under a street lamp. The two
boys darted for it, shouting and waving their hands to her.

Swarms of huge flies and beetles circled under the street lamps, striking
Sam and the woman in the face. One of them, a great black crawling thing,
alighted on her breast, and taking it in her hand she crept forward and
dropped it down the neck of the driver.

In spite of his hard drinking during the afternoon and evening, Sam's head
was clear and a calm hatred of life burned in him. His mind ran back over
the years he had passed since breaking his word to Sue, and a scorn of all
effort burned in him.

"It is what a man gets who goes seeking Truth," he thought. "He comes to a
fine end in life."

On all sides of him life ran playing on the pavement and leaping in the
air. It circled and buzzed and sang above his head in the summer night
there in the heart of the city. Even in the sullen man sitting in the
carriage beside the black-haired woman it began to sing. The blood climbed
through his body; an old half-dead longing, half hunger, half hope awoke
in him, pulsating and insistent. He looked at the laughing, intoxicated
woman beside him and a feeling of masculine approval shot through him. He
began thinking of what she had said before the laughing crowd on the
steamer.

"I have borne three children and can bear more."

His blood, stirred by the sight of the woman, awoke his sleeping brain,
and he began again to quarrel with life and what life had offered him. He
thought that always he would stubbornly refuse to accept the call of life
unless he could have it on his own terms, unless he could command and
direct it as he had commanded and directed the gun company.

"Else why am I here?" he muttered, looking away from the vacant, laughing
face of the woman and at the broad, muscular back of the driver on the
seat in front. "Why had I a brain and a dream and a hope? Why went I about
seeking Truth?"

His mind ran on in the vein started by the sight of the circling beetles
and the running boys. The woman put her head upon his shoulder and her
black hair blew against his face. She struck wildly at the circling
beetles, laughing like a child when she had caught one of them in her
hand.

"Men like me are for some end. They are not to be played with as I have
been," he muttered, clinging to the hand of the woman, who, also, he
thought, was being tossed about by life.

Before a saloon, on a street where cars ran, the carriage stopped. Through
the open front door Sam could see working-men standing before a bar
drinking foaming glasses of beer, the hanging lamps above their heads
throwing their black shadows upon the floor. A strong, stale smell came
out at the door. The woman leaned over the side of the carriage and
shouted. "O Will, come out here."

A man clad in a long white apron and with his shirt sleeves rolled to his
elbows came from behind the bar and talked to her, and when they had
started on she told Sam of her plan to sell her home and buy the place.

"Will you run it?" he asked.

"Sure," she said. "The kids can take care of themselves."

At the end of a little street of a half dozen neat cottages, they got out
of the carriage and walked with uncertain steps along a sidewalk skirting
a high bluff and overlooking the river. Below the houses a tangled mass of
bushes and small trees lay black in the moonlight, and in the distance the
grey body of the river showed faint and far away. The undergrowth was so
thick that, looking down, one saw only the tops of the growth, with here
and there a grey outcrop of rocks that glistened in the moonlight.

Up a flight of stone steps they climbed to the porch of one of the houses
facing the river. The woman had stopped laughing and hung heavily on Sam's
arm, her feet groping for the steps. They passed through a door and into a
long, low-ceilinged room. An open stairway at the side of the room went up
to the floor above, and through a curtained doorway at the end one looked
into a small dining-room. A rag carpet lay on the floor
 and about a table, under a hanging lamp at the centre, sat three
children. Sam looked at them closely. His head reeled and he clutched at
the knob of the door. A boy of perhaps fourteen, with freckles on his face
and on the backs of his hands and with reddish-brown hair and brown eyes,
was reading aloud. Beside him a younger boy with black hair and black
eyes, and with his knees doubled up on the chair in front of him so that
his chin rested on them, sat listening. A tiny girl, pale and with yellow
hair and dark circles under her eyes, slept in another chair, her head
hanging uncomfortably to one side. She was, one would have said, seven,
the black-haired boy ten.

The freckle-faced boy stopped reading and looked at the man and woman; the
sleeping child stirred uneasily in her chair, and the black-haired boy
straightened out his legs and looked over his shoulder.

"Hello, Mother," he said heartily.

The woman walked unsteadily to the curtained doorway leading into the
dining-room and pulled aside the curtains.

"Come here, Joe," she said.

The freckle-faced boy arose and went toward her. She stood aside,
supporting herself with one hand grasping the curtain. As he passed she
struck him with her open hand on the back of the head, sending him reeling
into the dining-room.

"Now you, Tom," she called to the black-haired boy. "I told you kids to
wash the dishes after supper and to put Mary to bed. Here it is past ten
and nothing done and you two reading books again."

The black-haired boy got up and started obediently toward her, but Sam
walked rapidly past him and clutched the woman by the arm so that she
winced and twisted in his grasp.

"You come with me," he said.

He walked the woman across the room and up the stairs. She leaned heavily
on his arm, laughing, and looking up into his face.

At the top of the stairway he stopped.

"We go in here," she said, pointing to a door.

He took her into the room. "You get to sleep," he said, and going out
closed the door, leaving her sitting heavily on the edge of the bed.

Downstairs he found the two boys among the dishes in a tiny kitchen off
the dining-room. The little girl still slept uneasily in the chair by the
table, the hot lamp-light streaming down on her thin cheeks.

Sam stood in the kitchen door looking at the two boys, who looked back at
him self-consciously.

"Which of you two puts Mary to bed?" he asked, and then, without waiting
for an answer, turned to the taller of the two boys. "Let Tom do it," he
said. "I will help you here."

Joe and Sam stood in the kitchen at work with the dishes; the boy, going
busily about, showed the man where to put the clean dishes, and got him
dry wiping towels. Sam's coat was off and his sleeves rolled up.

The work went on in half awkward silence and a storm went on within Sam's
breast. When the boy Joe looked shyly up at him it was as though the lash
of a whip had cut down across flesh, suddenly grown tender. Old memories
began to stir within him and he remembered his own childhood, his mother
at work among other people's soiled clothes, his father Windy coming home
drunk, and the chill in his mother's heart and in his own. There was
something men and women owed to childhood, not because it was childhood
but because it was new life springing up. Aside from any question of
fatherhood or motherhood there was a debt to be paid.

In the little house on the bluff there was silence. Outside the house
there was darkness and darkness lay over Sam's spirit. The boy Joe went
quickly about, putting the dishes Sam had wiped on the shelves. Somewhere
on the river, far below the house, a steamboat whistled. The backs of the
hands of the boy were covered with freckles. How quick and competent the
hands were. Here was new life, as yet clean, unsoiled, unshaken by life.
Sam was shamed by the trembling of his own hands. He had always wanted
quickness and firmness within his own body, the health of the body that is
a temple for the health of the spirit. He was an American and down deep
within himself was the moral fervor that is American and that had become
so strangely perverted in himself and others. As so often happened with
him, when he was deeply stirred, an army of vagrant thoughts ran through
his head. The thoughts had taken the place of the perpetual scheming and
planning of his days as a man of affairs, but as yet all his thinking had
brought him to nothing and had only left him more shaken and uncertain
then ever.

The dishes were now all wiped and he went out of the kitchen glad to
escape the shy silent presence of the boy. "Has life quite gone from me?
Am I but a dead thing walking about?" he asked himself. The presence of
the children had made him feel that he was himself but a child, a grown
tired and shaken child. There was maturity and manhood somewhere abroad.
Why could he not come to it? Why could it not come into him?

The boy Tom returned from having put his sister into bed and the two boys
said good night to the strange man in their mother's house. Joe, the
bolder of the two, stepped forward and offered his hand. Sam shook it
solemnly and then the younger boy came forward.

"I'll be around here to-morrow I think," Sam said huskily.

The boys were gone, into the silence of the house, and Sam walked up and
down in the little room. He was restless as though about to start on a new
journey and half unconsciously began running his hands over his body
wishing it strong and hard as when he tramped the road. As on the day when
he had walked out of the Chicago Club bound on his hunt for Truth, he let
his mind go so that it played freely over his past life, reviewing and
analysing.

For hours he sat on the porch or walked up and down in the room where the
lamp still burned brightly. Again the smoke from his pipe tasted good on
his tongue and all the night air had a sweetness that brought back to him
the walk beside the bridle path in Jackson Park when Sue had given him
herself, and with herself a new impulse in life.

It was two o'clock when he lay down upon a couch in the living-room and
blew out the light. He did not undress, but threw his shoes on the floor
and lay looking at a wide path of moonlight that came through the open
door. In the darkness it seemed that his mind worked more rapidly and that
the events and motives of his restless years went streaming past like
living things upon the floor.

Suddenly he sat up and listened. The voice of one of the boys, heavy with
sleep, ran through the upper part of the house.

"Mother! O Mother!" called the sleepy voice, and Sam thought he could hear
the little body moving restlessly in bed.

Silence followed. He sat upon the edge of the couch, waiting. It seemed to
him that he was coming to something; that his brain that had for hours
been working more and more rapidly was about to produce the thing for
which he waited. He felt as he had felt that night as he waited in the
corridor of the hospital.

In the morning the three children came down the stairs and finished
dressing in the long room, the little girl coming last, carrying her shoes
and stockings and rubbing her eyes with the back of her hand. A cool
morning wind blew up from the river and through the open screened doors as
he and Joe cooked breakfast, and later as the four of them sat at the
table Sam tried to talk but did not make much progress. His tongue was
heavy and the children seemed looking at him with strange questioning
eyes. "Why are you here?" their eyes asked.

For a week Sam stayed in the city, coming daily to the house. With the
children he talked a little, and in the evening, when the mother had gone
away, the little girl came to him. He carried her to a chair on the porch
outside and while the boys sat reading under the lamp inside she went to
sleep in his arms. Her body was warm and the breath came softly and
sweetly from between her lips. Sam looked down the bluffside and saw the
country and the river far below, sweet in the moonlight. Tears came into
his eyes. Was a new sweet purpose growing within him or were the tears but
evidence of self pity? He wondered.

One night the black-haired woman again came home far gone in drink, and
again Sam led her up the stairs to see her fall muttering and babbling
upon the bed. Her companion, a little flashily dressed man with a beard,
had run off at the sight of Sam standing in the living-room under the
lamp. The two boys, to whom he had been reading, said nothing, looking
self-consciously at the book upon the table and occasionally out of the
corner of their eyes at their new friend. In a few minutes they too went
up the stairs, and as on that first night, they put out their hands
awkwardly.

Through the night Sam again sat in the darkness outside or lay awake on
the couch. "I will make a new try, adopt a new purpose in life now," he
said to himself.

When the children had gone to school the next morning, Sam took a car and
went into the city, going first to a bank to have a large draft cashed.
Then he spent many busy hours going from store to store and buying
clothes, caps, soft underwear, suit cases, dresses, night clothes, and
books. Last of all he bought a large dressed doll. All these things he had
sent to his room at the hotel, leaving a man there to pack the trunks and
suit cases, and get them to the station. A large, motherly-looking woman,
an employe of the hotel, who passed through the hall, offered to help with
the packing.

After another visit or two Sam got back upon the car and went again to the
house. In his pockets he had several thousands of dollars in large bills.
He had remembered the power of cash in deals he had made in the past.

"I will see what it will do here," he thought.

In the house Sam found the black-haired woman lying on a couch in the
living-room. As he came in at the door she arose unsteadily and looked at
him.

"There's a bottle in the cupboard in the kitchen," she said. "Get me a
drink. Why do you hang about here?"

Sam brought the bottle and poured her a drink, pretending to drink with
her by putting the bottle to his lips and throwing back his head.

"What was your husband like?" he asked.

"Who? Jack?" she said. "Oh, he was all right. He was stuck on me. He stood
for anything until I brought men home here. Then he got crazy and went
away." She looked at Sam and laughed.

"I didn't care much for him," she added. "He couldn't make money enough
for a live woman."

Sam began talking of the saloon she intended buying.

"The children will be a bother, eh?" he said.

"I have an offer for the house," she said. "I wish I didn't have the kids.
They are a nuisance."

"I have been figuring that out," Sam told her. "I know a woman in the East
who would take them and raise them. She is wild about kids. I should like
to do something to help you. I might take them to her."

"In the name of Heaven, man, lead them away," she laughed, and took
another drink from the bottle.

Sam drew from his pocket a paper he had secured from a downtown attorney.

"Get a neighbour in here to witness this," he said. "The woman will want
things regular. It releases you from all responsibility for the kids and
puts it on her."

She looked at him suspiciously. "What's the graft? Who gets stuck for the
fares down east?"

Sam laughed and going to the back door shouted to a man who sat under a
tree back of the next house smoking a pipe.

"Sign here," he said, putting the paper before her. "Here is your
neighbour to sign as witness. You do not get stuck for a cent."

The woman, half drunk, signed the paper, after a long doubtful look at
Sam, and when she had signed and had taken another drink from the bottle
lay down again on the couch.

"If any one wakes me up for the next six hours they will get killed," she
declared. It was evident she knew little of what she had done, but at the
moment Sam did not care. He was again a bargainer, ready to take an
advantage. Vaguely he felt that he might be bargaining for an end in life,
for purpose to come into his own life.

Sam went quietly down the stone steps and along the little street at the
brow of the hill to the car tracks, and at noon was waiting in an
automobile outside the door of the schoolhouse when the children came out.

He drove across the city to the Union Station, the three children
accepting him and all he did without question. At the station they found
the man from the hotel with the trunks and with three bright new suit
cases. Sam went to the express office and putting several bills into an
envelope sealed and sent it to the woman while the three children walked
up and down in the train shed carrying the cases, aglow with the pride of
them.

At two o'clock Sam, with the little girl in his arms and with one of the
boys seated on either side of him, sat in a stateroom of a New York flyer
--bound for Sue.




CHAPTER II


Sam McPherson is a living American. He is a rich man, but his money, that
he spent so many years and so much of his energy acquiring, does not mean
much to him. What is true of him is true of more wealthy Americans than is
commonly believed. Something has happened to him that has happened to the
others also, to how many of the others? Men of courage, with strong bodies
and quick brains, men who have come of a strong race, have taken up what
they had thought to be the banner of life and carried it forward. Growing
weary they have stopped in a road that climbs a long hill and have leaned
the banner against a tree. Tight brains have loosened a little. Strong
convictions have become weak. Old gods are dying.

  "It is only when you are torn from your mooring and
    drift like a rudderless ship I am able to come
    near to you."

The banner has been carried forward by a strong daring man filled with
determination.

What is inscribed on it?

It would perhaps be dangerous to inquire too closely. We Americans have
believed that life must have point and purpose. We have called ourselves
Christians, but the sweet Christian philosophy of failure has been unknown
among us. To say of one of us that he has failed is to take life and
courage away. For so long we have had to push blindly forward. Roads had
to be cut through our forests, great towns must be built. What in Europe
has been slowly building itself out of the fibre of the generations we
must build now, in a lifetime.

In our father's day, at night in the forests of Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky,
and on the wide prairies, wolves howled. There was fear in our fathers and
mothers, pushing their way forward, making the new land. When the land was
conquered fear remained, the fear of failure. Deep in our American souls
the wolves still howl.

       *       *       *       *       *

There were moments after Sam came back to Sue, bringing the three
children, when he thought he had snatched success out of the very jaws of
failure.

But the thing from which he had all his life been fleeing was still there.
It hid itself in the branches of the trees that lined the New England
roads where he went to walk with the two boys. At night it looked down at
him from the stars.

Perhaps life wanted acceptance from him, but he could not accept. Perhaps
his story and his life ended with the home-coming, perhaps it began then.

The home-coming was not in itself a completely happy event. There was a
house with a fire at night and the voices of the children. In Sam's breast
there was a feeling of something alive, growing.

Sue was generous, but she was not now the Sue of the bridle path in
Jackson Park in Chicago or the Sue who had tried to remake the world by
raising fallen women. On his arrival at her house, on a summer night,
coming in suddenly and strangely with the three strange children--a little
inclined toward tears and homesickness--she was flustered and nervous.

Darkness was coming on when he walked up the gravel path from the gate to
the house door with the child Mary in his arms and the two boys, Joe and
Tom, walking soberly and solemnly beside him. Sue had just come out at the
front door and stood regarding them, startled and a little frightened. Her
hair was becoming grey, but as she stood there Sam thought her figure
almost boyish in its slenderness.

With quick generosity she threw aside the inclination in herself to ask
many questions but there was the suggestion of a taunt in the question she
did ask.

"Have you decided to come back to me and is this your home-coming?" she
asked, stepping down into the path and looking not at Sam but at the
children.

Sam did not answer at once, and little Mary began to cry. That was a help.

"They will all be wanting something to eat and a place to sleep," he said,
as though coming back to a wife, long neglected, and bringing with him
three strange children were an everyday affair.

Although she was puzzled and afraid, Sue smiled and led the way into the
house. Lamps were lighted and the five human beings, so abruptly brought
together, stood looking at each other. The two boys clung to each other
and little Mary put her arms about Sam's neck and hid her face on his
shoulder. He unloosed her clutching hands and put her boldly into Sue's
arms. "She will be your mother now," he said defiantly, not looking at
Sue.

       *       *       *       *       *

The evening was got through, blunderingly by himself, Sam thought, and
very nobly by Sue.

There was the mother hunger still alive in her. He had shrewdly counted on
that. It blinded her eyes to other things and then a notion had come into
her head and there seemed the possibility of doing a peculiarly romantic
act. Before that notion was destroyed, later in the evening, both Sam and
the children had been installed in the house.

A tall strong Negress came into the room, and Sue gave her instructions
regarding food for the children. "They will want bread and milk, and beds
must be found for them," she said, and then, although her mind was still
filled with the romantic notion that they were Sam's children by some
other woman, she took her plunge. "This is Mr. McPherson, my husband, and
these are our three children," she announced to the puzzled and smiling
servant.

They went into a low-ceilinged room whose windows looked into a garden. In
the garden an old Negro with a sprinkling can was watering flowers. A
little light yet remained. Both Sam and Sue were glad there was no more.
"Don't bring lamps, a candle will do," Sue said, and she went to stand
near the door beside her husband. The three children were on the point of
breaking forth into sobs, but the Negro woman with a quick intuitive sense
of the situation began to chatter, striving to make the children feel at
home. She awoke wonder and hope in the breasts of the boys. "There is a
barn with horses and cows. To-morrow old Ben will show you everything,"
she said, smiling at them.

       *       *       *       *       *

A thick grove of elm and maple trees stood between Sue's house and a road
that went down a hill into a New England village, and while Sue and the
Negro woman put the children to bed, Sam went there to wait. In the feeble
light the trunks of trees could be dimly seen, but the thick branches
overhead made a wall between him and the sky. He went back into the
darkness of the grove and then returned toward the open space before the
house.

He was nervous and distraught and two Sam McPhersons seemed struggling for
possession of his person.

There was the man he had been taught by the life about him to bring always
to the surface, the shrewd, capable man who got his own way, trampled
people underfoot, went plunging forward, always he hoped forward, the man
of achievement.

And then there was another personality, a quite different being
altogether, buried away within him, long neglected, often forgotten, a
timid, shy, destructive Sam who had never really breathed or lived or
walked before men.

What of him? The life Sam had led had not taken the shy destructive thing
within into account. Still it was powerful. Had it not torn him out of his
place in life, made of him a homeless wanderer? How many times it had
tried to speak its own word, take entire possession of him.

It was trying again now, and again and from old habit Sam fought against
it, thrusting it back into the dark inner caves of himself, back into
darkness.

He kept whispering to himself. Perhaps now the test of his life had come.
There was a way to approach life and love. There was Sue. A basis for love
and understanding might be found with her. Later the impulse could be
carried on and into the lives of the children he had found and brought to
her.

A vision of himself as a truly humble man, kneeling before life, kneeling
before the intricate wonder of life, came to him, but he was again afraid.
When he saw Sue's figure, dressed in white, a dim, pale, flashing thing,
coming down steps toward him, he wanted to run away, to hide himself in
the darkness.

And he wanted also to run toward her, to kneel at her feet, not because
she was Sue but because she was human and like himself filled with human
perplexities.

He did neither of the two things. The boy of Caxton was still alive within
him. With a boyish lift of the head he went boldly to her. "Nothing but
boldness will answer now," he kept saying to himself.

       *       *       *       *       *

They walked in the gravel path before the house and he tried lamely to
tell his story, the story of his wanderings, of his seeking. When he came
to the tale of the finding of the children she stopped in the path and
stood listening, pale and tense in the half light.

Then she threw back her head and laughed, nervously, half hysterically. "I
have taken them and you, of course," she said, after he had stepped to her
and had put his arm about her waist. "My life alone hasn't turned out to
be a very inspiring affair. I had made up my mind to take them and you, in
the house there. The two years you have been gone have seemed like an age.
What a foolish mistake my mind has made. I thought they must be your own
children by some other woman, some woman you had found to take my place.
It was an odd notion. Why, the older of the two must be nearly fourteen."

They went toward the house, the Negro woman having, at Sue's command,
found food for Sam and respread the table, but at the door he stopped and
excusing himself stepped again into the darkness under the trees.

In the house lamps had been lighted and he could see Sue's figure going
through a room at the front of the house toward the dining-room. Presently
she returned and pulled the shades at the front windows. A place was being
prepared for him inside there, a shut-in place in which he was to live
what was left of his life.

With the pulling of the shades darkness dropped down over the figure of
the man standing just within the grove of trees and darkness dropped down
over the inner man also. The struggle within him became more intense.

Could he surrender to others, live for others? There was the house darkly
seen before him. It was a symbol. Within the house was the woman, Sue,
ready and willing to begin the task of rebuilding their lives together.
Upstairs in the house now were the three children, three children who must
begin life as he had once done, who must listen to his voice, the voice of
Sue and all the other voices they would hear speaking words in the world.
They would grow up and thrust out into a world of people as he had done.

To what end?

There was an end. Sam believed that stoutly. "To shift the load to the
shoulders of children is cowardice," he whispered to himself.

An almost overpowering desire to turn and run away from the house, from
Sue who had so generously received him and from the three new lives into
which he had thrust himself and in which in the future he would have to be
concerned, took hold of him. His body shook with the strength of it, but
he stood still under the trees. "I cannot run away from life. I must face
it. I must begin to try to understand these other lives, to love," he told
himself. The buried inner thing in him thrust itself up.

How still the night had become. In the tree beneath which he stood a bird
moved on some slender branch and there was a faint rustling of leaves. The
darkness before and behind was a wall through which he must in some way
manage to thrust himself into the light. With his hand before him, as
though trying to push aside some dark blinding mass, he moved out of the
grove and thus moving stumbled up the steps and into the house.

THE END




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