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"Do not quote that crowd," she burst out.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.
"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.