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
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